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SHANDYGAFF 






SHANDYGAFF: a very refreshing drink, being a 
mixture of bitter ale or beer and ginger-beer, commonly 
drunk by the lower classes in England, and by stroll- 
ing tinkers, low church parsons, newspaper men, 
journalists, and prizefighters. Said to have been in- 
vented by Henry VIII as a solace for his matrimonial 
difficulties. It is believed that a continual bibbing of 
shandygaff saps the will, the nerves, the resolution, and 
the finer faculties, but there are those who will abide 
no other tipple. 

John Mistletoe: 

Dictionary of Deplorable Fads. 



SHANDYGAFF 

A number of most agreeable Inquirendoes 
upon Life and Letters, interspersed with 
Short Stories and Skitts, the whole Most 

" Diverting to the Reader 



Accompanied also by some Notes for Teachers 
whereby the Booke may be made usefull 
in class-room or for private Improvement 



By 

CHRISTOPHER, MORLEY 

Reputed also to be the Authour of "Parnassus 
on Wheels," and "Songs for a Little House" 



Published by Doubleday, Page and Company 
at the Country Life Press in Garden City, 
New York, and to be had at the Terminal 
Book Shop, the Lord <& Taylor Book Shop, 
the Liberty Tower Book Shop, and indeed 
of all reputable booksellers. A Dom' 1918 



<•$$ 



Copyright, 1918, by 

DOUBLEDAT, PAGE & COMPANY 

All rights reserved, including that of 
translation into foreign languages, 
• including the Scandinavian 



MAY -3 1918 



142 



The Song' of Shandygaff 

Now there are poets many, and singers bold and free, 

But I desire a special choir to troll a stave for me, 

No limping stave, no pimping stave, but a ballad bluff and rude 

In honour of sweet shandygaff, the finest tipple brewed. 

Though Vachel Lindsay sings with fire, alas, he drinks no beer; 
And Masters never could be called a poet of good cheer; 
And Bill Benet, though people say he hath a Bacchic vein, 
Is a married man, and his bousing can is hung up high to drain. 

Joyce Kilmer plucks a pleasing string, Don Marquis mulls his 
malt; 

And Untermeyer twangs a lyre with which I find no fault; 

But of all who lilt when wine is spilt, who swim in half-and- 
half, 

Where is the Jove, the Proper Cove, to sing of Shandygaff? 

He should be grey and bearded, and stained with nicotine, 
With a five-inch chop before him, and a glass like a tureen; 
Rotund as any firkin, with a wit like W eland! s brand, 
And he will chant the ribald songs that poets understand. 

Then all the young and feeble will be gently warned away, 
And thrice the draught will go the round with never a word to say; 
But when the gifted moment comes, and serving men retire, 
He'll sing the Song of Shandygaff, the song that I desire. 



I 



TITLES AND DEDICATIONS 

I WANTED to call these exercises "Casual 
Ablutions," in memory of the immortal sign 
in the washroom of the British Museum, but 
my arbiter of elegance forbade it. You remember 
that George Gissing, homeless and penniless on 
London streets, used to enjoy the lavatory of the 
Museum Reading Room as a fountain and a 
shrine. But the flinty hearted trustees, finding 
him using the wash-stand for bath-tub and 
laundry, were exceeding wroth, and set up the 
notice 



THESE BASINS ARE FOR 
CASUAL ABLUTIONS ONLY 



I would like to issue the same warning to the 
implacable reader: these fugitive pieces, very 
casual rinsings in the great basin of letters, must 
not be too bitterly resented, even by their pub- 
lishers. To borrow O. Henry's joke, they are more 
demitasso than Tasso. 

The real purpose in writing books is to have 



viii TITLES AND DEDICATIONS 

the pleasure of dedicating them to someone, and 
here I am in a quandary. So many dedications 
have occurred to me, it seems only fair to give 
them all a chance. 

I thought of dedicating the book to 

Clayton Sedgwick Cooper 
The Laird of Westcolang 

I thought of dedicating to the 

Two Best Book Shops in the Woeld 
Blackwell's in Oxford and 
Leary's in Philadelphia 

I thought of dedicating to 

The 8:13 Train 

I thought of dedicating to 

Edward Page Allinson 

The Squire of Town's End Farm 

Better known as Mifflin McGill 

In affectionate memory of 

Many unseasonable jests 

I thought of dedicating to 

Professor Francis B. Gummere 
From an erring pupil 

I thought of dedicating to 

Francis R. Bellamy 

Author of "The Balance" 

Whose Talent I Revere, 

But Whose Syntax I Deplore 



TITLES AND DEDICATIONS ix 

I thought of dedicating to 

John N. Beffel 

My First Editor 

Who insisted on taking me seriously 

I thought of dedicating to 

Guy S. K. Wheeleb 
The Lion Cub 

I thought of dedicating to 

Robert Cortes Holliday 
The Urbanolater 

I thought of dedicating to 

Silas Orrin Howes 
Faithful Servant of Letters 

But my final and irrevocable decision is to dedi- 
cate this book to 

The Miehle Printing Press 
More Sinned Against Than Sinning 



For permission to reprint, I denounce The New 
York Evening Post, The Boston Transcript, The 
Bellman, The Smart Set, The New York Sun, The 
New York Evening Sun, The American Oxonian, 
Collier's, and The Ladies' Home Journal. 



Wyncote, Pa. 
November, 1917. 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 



~ The Song of Shandygaff v 

Titles and Dedications vii 

A Question of Plumage 3 

Don Marquis 22 

- The Art of Walking 

Rupert Brooke . 5i 

The Man 72 

The Head of the Firm 82 

17HeriotRow 90 

Frank Confessions of a Publisher's Reader . 103 

William McFee 112 

Rhubarb 127 

The Haunting Beauty of Strychnine . . 137 

v ^Ingo 142 

Housebroken 150 

The Hilarity of Hilaire 154 

A Casual of the Sea 169 

The Last Pipe . 182 

si 



xii CONTENTS 



PAGE 



^-Time to Light the Furnace . . . . . 194 

My Friend 201 

A Poet of Sad Vigils 205 

Trivia 222 

Prefaces 229 

The Skipper 238 

A Friend of FitzGerald 246 

A Venture in Mysticism 260 

An Oxford Landlady 266 

"Peacock Pie" 271 

The Literary Pawnshop 278 

/A Morning in Marathon 284 

The American House of Lords .... 289 

Cotswold Winds 292 

Clouds 296 

Unhealthy . 800 

Confessions of a Smoker S09 

Hay Febrifuge 315 

-^- r Appendix: Suggestions for Teachers. . . 324 f 



SHANDYGAFF 



SHANDYGAFF 



A QUESTION OF PLUMAGE 

KENNETH STOCKTON was a man of 
letters, and correspondingly poor. He 
. was the literary editor of a leading metro- 
politan daily; but this job only netted him fifty 
dollars a week, and he was lucky to get that much. 
The owner of the paper was powerfully in favour of 
having the reviews done by the sporting editor, and 
confining them to the books of those publishers 
who bought advertising space. This simple and 
statesmanlike view the owner had frequently 
expressed in Mr. Stockton's hearing, so the latter 
was never very sure how long his job would con- 
tinue. 

But Mr. Stockton had a house, a wife, and four 
children in New Utrecht, that very ingenious sub- 
urb of Brooklyn. He had worked the problem 
out to a nicety long ago. If he did not bring 
home, on the average, eighty dollars a week, his 
household would cease to revolve. It simply 
had to be done. The house was still being paid 

8 



4 SHANDYGAFF 

for on the installment plan. There were plumb- 
ers' bills, servant's wages, clothes and schooling 
for the children, clothes for the wife, two suits a 
year for himself, and the dues of the Sheepshead 
Golf Club— his only extravagance. A simple 
middle-class routine, but one that, once embarked 
upon, turns into a treadmill. As I say, eighty 
dollars a week would just cover expenses. To 
accumulate any savings, pay for life insurance, 
and entertain friends, Stockton had to rise above 
that minimum. If in any week he fell below that 
figure he could not lie abed at night and "snort 
his fill," as the Elizabethan song naively puts it. 
There you have the groundwork of many a 
domestic drama. 

Mr. Stockton worked pretty hard at the news- 
paper office to earn his fifty dollars. He skimmed 
faithfully all the books that came in, wrote pains- 
taking reviews, and took care to run cuts on his 
literary page on Saturdays " to give the stuff kick, 
as the proprietor ordered. Though he did so with 
reluctance, he was forced now and then to ap- 
proach the book publishers on the subject of 
advertising. He gave earnest and honest thought 
to his literary department, and was once praised 
by Mr. Howells in Harper's Magazine for the 
honourable quality of his criticisms. 
But Mr. Stockton, like most men, had only a 



SHANDYGAFF 5 

certain fund of energy and enthusiasm at his dis- 
posal. His work on the paper used up the first 
fruits of his zeal and strength. After that came 
his article on current poetry, written (unsigned) 
for a leading imitation literary weekly. The 
preparation of this involved a careful perusal of at 
least fifty journals, both American and foreign, 
and I blush to say it brought him only fifteen 
dollars a week. He wrote a weekly "New York 
Letter" for a Chicago paper of bookish tendencies, 
in which he told with a flavour of intimacy the 
goings on of literary men in Manhattan whom he 
never had time or opportunity to meet. This 
article was paid for at space rates, which are less 
in Chicago than in New York. On this count 
he averaged about six dollars a week. 

That brings us up to seventy-one dollars, and 
also pretty close to the limit of our friend's en- 
durance. The additional ten dollars or so needed 
for the stability of the Stockton exchequer he 
earned in various ways. Neighbours in New 
Utrecht would hear his weary typewriter clacking 
far into the night. He wrote short stories, of only 
fair merit; and he wrote "Sunday stories," which 
is the lowest depth to which a self-respecting lover 
of literature can fall. Once in a while he gave a 
lecture on poetry, but he was a shy man, and he 
never was asked to lecture twice in the same 



6 SHANDYGAFF 

place. By almost incredible exertions of courage 
and obstinacy he wrote a novel, which was pub- 
lished, and sold 2,580 copies the first year. His 
royalties on this amounted to $348.30 — not one- 
third as much, he reflected sadly, as Irvin Cobb 
would receive for a single short story. He even did 
a little private tutoring at his home, giving the sons 
of some of his friends lessons in English literature. 

It is to be seen that Mr. Stockton's relatives, 
back in Indiana, were wrong when they wrote to 
him admiringly — as they did twice a year — asking 
for loans, and praising the bold and debonair life 
of a man of letters in the great city. They did 
not know that for ten years Mr. Stockton had 
refused the offers of his friends to put him up for 
membership at the literary club to which his 
fancy turned so fondly and so often. He could 
not afford it. When friends from out of town 
called on him, he took them to Peck's for a French 
table d'hote, with an apologetic murmur. 

But it is not to be thought that Mr. Stockton 
was unhappy or discontented. Those who have 
experienced the excitements of the existence where 
one lives from hand to mouth and back to hand 
again, with rarely more than fifty cents of loose 
change in pocket, know that there is even a kind 
of pleasurable exhilaration in it. The characters 
in George Gissing's Grub Street stories would 



SHANDYGAFF 7 

have thought Stockton rich indeed with his fifty- 
dollar salary. But he was one of those estimable 
men who have sense enough to give all their 
money to their wives and keep none in their 
trousers. And though his life was arduous and 
perhaps dull to outward view, he was a passionate 
lover of books, and in his little box at the back of 
the newspaper office, smoking a corncob and 
thumping out his reviews, he was one of the hap- 
piest men in New York. His thirst for books was 
a positive bulimia; how joyful he was when he 
found time to do a little work on his growing sheaf 
of literary essays, which he intended to call 
"Casual Ablutions," after the famous sign in the 
British Museum washroom. 

It was Mr. Stockton's custom to take a trolley 
as far as the Brooklyn bridge, and thence it was a 
pleasant walk to the office on Park Row. Gen- 
erally he left home about ten o'clock, thus avoiding 
the rush of traffic in the earlier hours; and loitering 
a little along the way, as becomes a man of ideas, 
his article on poetry would jell in his mind, and he 
would be at his desk a little after eleven. There he 
would work until one o'clock with the happy con- 
centration of those who enjoy their tasks. At that 
time he would go out for a bite of lunch, and would 
then be at his desk steadily from two until six. 
Dinner at home was at seven, and after that 



8 SHANDYGAFF 

he worked persistently in his little den under the 
roof until past midnight. 

One morning in spring he left New Utrecht in a 
mood of perplexity, for to-day his even routine 
was in danger of interruption. Halfway across 
the bridge Stockton paused in some confusion of 
spirit to look down on the shining river and con- 
sider his course. 

A year or so before this time, in gathering copy 
for his poetry articles, he had first come across the 
name of Finsbury Verne in an English journal at 
the head of some exquisite verses. From time 
to time he found more of this writer's lyrics in the 
English magazines, and at length he had ventured 
a graceful article of appreciation. It happened 
that he was the first in this country to recognize 
Verne's talent, and to his great delight he had one 
day received a very charming letter from the poet 
himself, thanking him for his understanding 
criticism. 

Stockton, though a shy and reticent man, had 
the friendliest nature in the world, and some 
underlying spirit of kinship in Verne's letter 
prompted him to warm response. Thus began a 
correspondence which was a remarkable pleasure 
to the lonely reviewer, who knew no literary men, 
although his life was passed among books. 
Hardly dreaming that they would ever meet, he 



SHANDYGAFF 9 

had insisted on a promise that if Verne should ever 
visit the States he would make New Utrecht his 
headquarters. And now, on this very morning, 
there had come a wireless message via Seagate, 
saying that Verne was on a ship which would 
dock that afternoon. 

The dilemma may seem a trifling one, but to 
Stockton's sensitive nature it was gross indeed. 
He and his wife knew that they could offer but 
little to make the poet's visit charming. New 
Utrecht, on the way to Coney Island, is not a likely 
perching ground for poets; the house was small, 
shabby, and the spare room had long ago been 
made into a workshop for the two boys, where 
they built steam engines and pasted rotogravure 
pictures from the Sunday editions on the walls. 
The servant was an enormous coloured mammy, 
with a heart of ruddy gold, but in appearance she 
was pure Dahomey. The bathroom plumbing 
was out of order, the drawing-room rug was fifteen 
years old, even the little lawn in front of the house 
needed trimming, and the gardener would not be 
round for several days. And Verne had given 
them only a few hours' notice. How like a poet! 

In his letters Stockton had innocently boasted 
of the pleasant time they would have when the 
writer should come to visit. He had spoken of 
evenings beside the fire when they would talk for 






10 SHANDYGAFF 

hours of the things that interest literary men. 
What would Verne think when he found the 
hearth only a gas log, and one that had a peculiarly 
offensive odour? This sickly sweetish smell had 
become in years of intimacy very dear to Stockton, 
but he could hardly expect a poet who lived in 
Well Walk, Hampstead (O Shades of Keats!), and 
wrote letters from a London literary club, to 
understand that sort of thing. Why, the man 
was a grandson of Jules Verne, and probably had 
been accustomed to refined surroundings all his 
life. And now he was doomed to plumb the sub- 
fuse depths of New Utrecht! 

Stockton could not even put him up at a club, as 
he belonged to none but the golf club, which had no 
quarters for the entertainment of out-of-town 
guests. Every detail of his home life was of the 
shabby, makeshift sort which is so dear to one's 
self but needs so much explaining to outsiders. 
He even thought with a pang of Lorna Doone, 
the fat, plebeian little mongrel terrier which had 
meals with the family and slept with the children 
at night. Verne was probably used to staghounds 
or Zeppelin hounds or something of the sort, he 
thought humorously. English poets wear an 
iris halo in the eyes of humble American reviewers. 
Those godlike creatures have walked on Fleet 
Street, have bought books on Paternoster Row, 



SHANDYGAFF 11 

have drunk half-and-half and eaten pigeon pie at 
the Salutation and Cat, and have probably roared 
with laughter over some alehouse jest of Mr. 
Chesterton. 

Stockton remembered the photograph Verne 
had sent him, showing a lean, bearded face with 
wistful dark eyes against a background of old 
folios. What would that Olympian creature think 
of the drudge of New Utrecht, a mere reviewer 
who sold his editorial copies to pay for shag 
tobacco! 

Well, thought Stockton, as he crossed the 
bridge, rejoicing not at all in the splendid towers 
of Manhattan, candescent in the April sun, they 
had done all they could. He had left his wife 
telephoning frantically to grocers, cleaning women, 
and florists. He himself had stopped at the 
poultry market on his way to the trolley to order 
two plump fowls for dinner, and had pinched 
them with his nervous, ink-stained fingers, as 
ordered by Mrs. Stockton, to test their tender- 
ness. They would send the three younger chil- 
dren to their grandmother, to be interned there 
until the storm had blown over; and Mrs. Stock- 
ton was going to do what she could to take down 
the rotogravure pictures from the walls of what the 
boys fondly called the Stockton Art Gallery. He 
knew that Verne had children of his own : perhaps 



12 SHANDYGAFF 

he would be amused rather than dismayed by the 
incongruities of their dismantled guestroom. Pre- 
sumably, the poet was over here for a lecture tour 
— he would be entertained and feted everywhere 
by the cultured rich, for the appreciation which 
Stockton had started by his modest little essay 
had grown to the dimension of a fad. 

He looked again at the telegram which had shat- 
tered the simple routine of his unassuming life. 
"On board Celtic dock this afternoon three o'clock 
hope see you. Verne." He sneezed sharply, as 
was his unconscious habit when nervous. In 
desperation he stopped at a veterinary's office on 
Frankfort Street, and left orders to have the doc- 
tor's assistant call for Lorna Doone and take her 
away, to be kept until sent for. Then he called 
at a wine merchant's and bought three bottles of 
claret of a moderate vintage. Verne had said 
something about claret in one of his playful letters. 
Unfortunately, the man's grandfather was a 
Frenchman, and undoubtedly he knew all about 
wines. 

Stockton sneezed so loudly and so often at his 
desk that morning that all his associates knew 
something was amiss. The Sunday editor, who 
had planned to borrow fifty cents from him at 
lunch time, refrained from doing so, in a spirit of 
pure Christian brotherhood. Even Bob Bolles, 



SHANDYGAFF 13 

the hundred-and-fifty-dollar-a-week conductor of 
"The Electric Chair," the paper's humorous 
column, came in to see what was up. Bob's 
"contribs" had been generous that morning, and 
he was in unusually good humour for a humourist. 

"What's the matter, Stock," he inquired gen- 
ially, "Got a cold? Or has George Moore sent in 
anew novel?" 

Stockton looked up sadly from the proofs he was 
correcting. How could he confess his paltry prob- 
lem to this debonair creature who wore life lightly, 
like a flower, and played at literature as he played 
tennis, with swerve and speed? Bolles was a 
bachelor, the author of a successful comedy, and 
a member of the smart literary club which was 
over the reviewer's horizon, although in the great 
ocean of letters the humourist was no more than a 
surf bather. Stockton shook his head. No one 
but a married man and an unsuccessful author 
could understand his trouble. 

"A touch of asthma," he fibbed shyly. "I 
always have it at this time of year." 

"Come and have some lunch," said the other. 
"We'll go up to the club and have some ale. 
That'll put you on your feet." 

"Thanks, ever so much," said Stockton, "but 
I can't do it to-day. Got to make up my page. 
I tell you what, though " 



14 SHANDYGAFF 

He hesitated, and flushed a little. 

"Say it," said Bolles kindly. 

"Verne is in town to-day; the English poet, you 
know. Grandson of old Jules Verne. I'm going 
to put him up at my house. I wish you'd take 
him around to the club for lunch some day while 
he's here. He ought to meet some of the men 
there. I've been corresponding with him for a 
long time, and I — I'm afraid I rather promised to 
take him round there, as though I were a member, 
you know." 

"Great snakes!" cried Bolles. "Verne? the 
author of * Candle Light'? And you're going to 
put him up? You lucky devil. Why, the man's 
bigger than Masefield. Take him to lunch — I 
should say I willJ Why, I'll put him in the col- 
yum. Both of you come round there to-morrow 
and we'll have an orgy. I'll order larks' tongues 
and convolvulus salad. I didn't know you knew 
him." 

"I don't — yet," said Stockton. "I'm going 
down to meet his steamer this afternoon." 

"Well, that's great news," said the volatile 
humourist. And he ran downstairs to buy the 
book of which he had so often heard but had never 
read. 

The sight of Bolles' well-cut suit of tweeds had 
reminded Stockton that he was still wearing the 



SHANDYGAFF 15 

threadbare serge that had done duty for three 
winters, and would hardly suffice for the honours 
to come. Hastily he blue-pencilled his proofs, 
threw them into the wire basket, and hurried out- 
doors to seek the nearest tailor. He stopped at 
the bank first, to draw out fifty dollars for 
emergencies. Then he entered the first clothier's 
shop he encountered on Nassau Street. 

Mr. Stockton was a nervous man, especially so 
in the crises when he was compelled to buy any- 
thing so important as a suit, for usually Mrs. 
Stockton supervised the selection. To-day his 
unlucky star was in the zenith. His watch 
pointed to close on two o'clock, and he was afraid 
he might be late for the steamer, which docked 
far uptown. In his haste, and governed perhaps 
by some subconscious recollection of the humour- 
ist's attractive shaggy tweeds, he allowed himself 
to be fitted with an ochre-coloured suit of some 
fleecy checked material grotesquely improper for 
his unassuming figure. It was the kind of cloth 
and cut that one sees only in the windows of 
Nassau Street. Happily he was unaware of the 
enormity of his offence against society, and rapidly 
transferring his belongings to the new pockets, he 
paid down the purchase price and fled to the sub- 
way. 

When he reached the pier at the foot of Four- 



16 SHANDYGAFF 

teenth Street he saw that the steamer was still in 
midstream and it would be several minutes before 
she warped in to the dock. He had no pass from 
the steamship office, but on showing his news- 
paperman's card the official admitted him to the 
pier, and he took his stand at the first cabin 
gangway, trembling a little with nervousness, but 
with a pleasant feeling of excitement no less. He 
gazed at the others waiting for arriving travellers 
and wondered whether any of the peers of 
American letters had come to meet the poet. A 
stoutish, neatly dressed gentleman with a gray 
moustache looked like Mr. Howells, and he thrilled 
again. It was hardly possible that he, the obscure 
reviewer, was the only one who had been notified 
of Verne's arrival. That tall, hawk-faced man 
whose limousine was purring outside must be a 
certain publisher he knew by sight. 

What would these gentlemen say when they 
learned that the poet was to stay with Kenneth 
Stockton, in New Utrecht? He rolled up the 
mustard-coloured trousers one more round — they 
were much too long for him — and watched the 
great hull slide along the side of the pier with a 
peculiar tingling shudder that he had not felt 
since the day of his wedding. 

He* expected no difficulty in recognizing Fins- 
bury Verne, for he was very familiar with his 



SHANDYGAFF 17 

photograph. As the passengers poured down the 
slanting gangway, all bearing the unmistakable air 
and stamp of superiority that marks those who 
have just left the sacred soil of England, he 
scanned the faces with an eye of keen regard. To 
his surprise he saw the gentlemen he had marked 
respectively as Mr. Howells and the publisher 
greet people who had not the slightest resemblance 
to the poet, and go with them to the customs 
alcoves. Traveller after traveller hurried past 
him, followed by stewards carrying luggage; 
gradually the flow of people thinned, and then 
stopped altogether, save for one or two invalids 
who were being helped down the incline by nurses. 
And still no sign of Finsbury Verne. 

Suddenly a thought struck him. Was it pos- 
sible that — the second class? His eye brightened 
and he hurried to the gangway, fifty yards farther 
down the pier, where the second-cabin passengers 
were disembarking. 

There were more of the latter, and the passage- 
way was still thronged. Just as Stockton reached 
the foot of the plank a little man in green ulster 
and deerstalker cap, followed by a plump little 
woman and four children in single file, each hold- 
ing fast to the one in front like Alpine climbers, 
came down the narrow bridge, taking almost 
ludicrous care not to slip on the cleated boards. 



18 SHANDYGAFF 

To his amazement the reviewer recognized the 
dark beard and soulful eyes of the poet. 

Mr. Verne clutched in rigid arms, not a roll of 
manuscripts, but a wriggling French poodle, whose 
tufted tail waved under the poet's chin. The 
lady behind him, evidently his wife, as she clung 
steadfastly to the skirt of his ulster, held tightly 
in the other hand a large glass jar in which two 
agitated goldfish were swimming, while the four 
children watched their parents with anxious eyes 
for the safety of their pets. "Daddy, look out 
for Ink!*' shrilled one of them, as the struggles of 
the poodle very nearly sent him into the water 
under the ship's side. Two smiling stewards with 
mountainous portmanteaux followed the party. 
"Mother, are Castor and Pollux all right?" cried 
the smallest child, and promptly fell on his nose 
on the gangway, disrupting the file. 

Stockton, with characteristic delicacy, refrained 
from making himself known until the Vernes had 
recovered from the embarrassments of leaving the 
ship. He followed them at a distance to the "V" 
section where they waited for the customs ex- 
amination. With mingled feelings he saw that 
Finsbury Verne was no cloud-walking deity, but 
one even as himself, indifferently clad, shy and 
perplexed of eye, worried with the comic cares of a 
family man. All his heart warmed toward the 



SHANDYGAFF 19 

poet, who stood in his bulging greatcoat, perspiring 
and aghast at the uproar around him. " He shrank 
from imagining what might happen when he ap- 
peared at home with the whole family, but without 
hesitation he approached and introduced himself. 

Verne's eyes shone with unaffected pleasure at 
the meeting, and he presented the reviewer to his 
wife and the children, two boys and two girls. 
The two boys, aged about ten and eight, im- 
mediately uttered cryptic remarks which Stock- 
ton judged were addressed to him. 

"Castorian!" cried the larger boy, looking at the 
yellow suit. 

"Polluxite!" piped the other in the same breath. 

Mrs. Verne, in some embarrassment, explained 
that the boys were in the throes of a new game 
they had invented on the voyage. They had 
created two imaginary countries, named in honour 
of the goldfish, and it was now their whim to claim 
for their respective countries any person or thing 
that struck their fancy. "Castoria was first," 
said Mrs. Verne, "so you must consider yourself a 
citizen of that nation." 

Somewhat shamefaced at this sudden honour, 
Mr. Stockton turned to the poet. "You're all 
coming home with me, aren't you?" he said. "I 
got your telegram this morning. We'd be de- 
lighted to have you." 



20 SHANDYGAFF 

"It's awfully good of you," said the poet, "but 
as a matter of fact we're going straight on to the 
country to-morrow morning. My wife has some 
relatives in Yonkers, wherever they are, and she 
and the children are going to stay with them. 
I've got to go up to Harvard to give some 
lectures." 

A rush of cool, sweet relief bathed Stockton's 
brow. 

"Why, I'm disappointed you're going right on," 
he stammered. "Mrs. Stockton and I were 
hoping " 

"My dear fellow, we could never impose such a 
party on your hospitality," said Verne. "Per- 
haps you can recommend us to some quiet hotel 
where we can stay the night." 

Like all New Yorkers, Stockton could hardly 
think of the name of any hotel when asked sud- 
denly. At first he said the Astor House, and then 
remembered that it had been demolished years 
before. At last he recollected that a brother of 
his from Indiana had once stayed at the Obelisk. 

After the customs formalities were over — not 
without embarrassment, as Mr. Verne's valise when 
opened displayed several pairs of bright red union 
suits and a half -empty bottle of brandy — Stockton 
convoyed them to a taxi. Noticing the frayed 
sleeve of the poet's ulster he felt quite ashamed 



SHANDYGAFF 21 

of the aggressive newness of his clothes. And when 
the visitors whirled away, after renewed promises 
for a meeting a little later in the spring, he stood 
for a moment in a kind of daze. Then he hurried 
toward the nearest telephone booth. 

As the Vernes sat at dinner that night in the 
Abyssinian Room of the Obelisk Hotel, the poet 
said to his wife: "It would have been delightful 
to spend a few days with the Stocktons." 

"My dear," said she, "I wouldn't have these 
wealthy Americans see how shabby we are for 
anything. The children are positively in rags, 
and your clothes — well, I don't know what they'll 
think at Harvard. You know if this lecture trip 
doesn't turn out well we shall be simply bank- 
rupt." 

The poet sighed. "I believe Stockton has 
quite a charming place in the country near New 
York," he said. 

"That may be so," said Mrs. Verne. "But did 
you ever see such clothes? He looked like a 
canary." 



DON MARQUIS 

THERE is nothing more pathetic than the 
case of the author who is the victim of a 
supposedly critical essay. You hold him 
in the hollow of your hand. You may praise him 
for his humour when he wants to be considered a 
serious and saturnine dog. You may extol his 
songs of war and passion when he yearns to be 
esteemed a light, jovial merryandrew with never a 
care in the world save the cellar plumbing. You 
may utterly misrepresent him, and hang some 
albatross round his neck that will be offensive to 
him forever. You may say that he hails from 
Brooklyn Heights when the fact is that he left 
there two years ago and now lives in Port Wash- 
ington. You may even (for instance) call him 
stout. . . . 

Don Marquis was born in 1878; reckoning by 
tens, '88, '98, '08— well, call it forty. He is burly, 
ruddy, gray-haired, and fond of corn-cob pipes, 
dark beer, and sausages. He looks a careful 
blend of Falstaff and Napoleon III. He has con- 
ducted the Sun Dial in the New York Evening 
Sun since 1912. He stands out as one of the 

22 



SHANDYGAFF 23 

most penetrating satirists and resonant scoffers 
at folderol that this continent nourishes. He is 
far more than a colyumist: he is a poet — a kind of 
Meredithian Prometheus chained to the roar and 
clank of a Hoe press. He is a novelist of Stock- 
tonian gifts, although unfortunately for us he 
writes the first half of a novel easier than the 
second. And I think that in his secret heart and 
at the bottom of the old haircloth round-top 
trunk he is a dramatist. 

He good-naturedly deprecates that people praise 
"Archy the Vers Libre Cockroach" and clamour 
for more; while "Hermione," a careful and cut- 
ting satire on the follies of pseudokultur near the 
Dewey Arch, elicits only "a mild, mild smile." 
As he puts it: 

A chair broke down in the midst of a Bernard Shaw com- 
edy the other evening. Everybody laughed. They had 
been laughing before from time to time. That was because 
it was a Shaw comedy. But when the chair broke they roared. 
We don't blame them for roaring, but it makes us sad. 

The purveyor of intellectual highbrow wit and humour 
pours his soul into the business of capturing a few refined, 
appreciative grins in the course of a lifetime, grins that come 
from the brain; he is more than happy if once or twice in a 
generation he can get a cerebral chuckle — and then Old 
Boob Nature steps in and breaks a chair or flings a fat man 
down on the ice and the world laughs with all its heart and 
soul. 



24 SHANDYGAFF 

Don Marquis recognizes as well as any one the 
value of the slapstick as a mirth-provoking instru- 
ment. (All hail to the slapstick! it was well 
known at the Mermaid Tavern, we'll warrant.) 
But he prefers the rapier. Probably his Savage 
Portraits, splendidly truculent and slashing son- 
nets, are among the finest pieces he has done. 

The most honourable feature of Marquis's 
writing, the "small thing to look for but the big 
thing to find," is its quality of fine workmanship. 
The swamis and prophets of piffle, the Bhan- 
dranaths and Fothergill Finches whom he detests, 
can only create in an atmosphere specially warmed, 
purged and rose-watered for their moods. Mar- 
quis has emerged from the underworld of news- 
paper print just by his heroic ability to transform 
the commonest things into tools for his craft. 
Much of his best and subtlest work has been 
clacked out on a typewriter standing on an up- 
turned packing box. (When the American Maga- 
zine published a picture of him at work on his 
packing case the supply man of the Sun got 
worried, and gave him a regular desk.) News- 
paper men are a hardy race. Who but a man 
inured to the squalour of a newspaper office would 
dream of a cockroach as a hero? Archy was born 
in the old Sun building, now demolished, once 
known as Vermin Castle. 



SHANDYGAFF 25 

"Publishing a volume of verse," Don has 
plaintively observed, "is like dropping a rose- 
petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting to 
hear the echo." Yet if the petal be authentic 
rose, the answer will surely come. Some poets 
seek to raft oblivion by putting on frock coats 
and reading their works aloud to the women's 
clubs. Don Marquis has no taste for that sort 
of mummery. But little by little his potent, 
yeasty verses, fashioned from the roaring loom of 
every day, are winning their way into circulation. 
Any reader who went to Dreams and Dust (poems, 
published October, 1915) expecting to find light 
and waggish laughter, was on a blind quest. In 
that book speaks the hungry and visionary soul 
of this man, quick to see beauty and grace in 
common things, quick to question the answerle3s 
face of life — 

Still mounts the dream on shining pinion, 

Still broods the dull distrust; 
Which shall have ultimate dominion, 

Dream, or dust? 

Heavy men are light on their feet: it takes stout 
poets to write nimble verses (Mr. Chesterton, for 
instance). Don Marquis has something of Dob- 
sonian cunning to set his musings to delicate, aus- 
tere music. He can turn a rondeau or a triolet as 



26 SHANDYGAFF 

gracefully as a paying teller can roll Durham 
cigarettes. 

How neat this is : 

TO A DANCING DOLL 

Formal, quaint, precise, and trim, 
You begin your steps demurely — 

There's a spirit almost prim 
In the feet that move so surely. 

So discreetly, to the chime 

Of the music that so sweetly 
Marks the time. 

But the chords begin to tinkle 
Quicker, 

And your feet they flash and flicker — 
Twinkle!— 

Flash and flutter to a tricksy 
Fickle meter; I 

And you foot it like a pixie- 
Only fleeter! 

Not our current, dowdy 

Things— 
"Turkey trots" and rowdy 

Flings — 
For they made you overseas 
In politer times than these 
In an age when grace could please, 

Ere St. Vitus 
Clutched and shook us, spine and knees; 
Loosed a plague of jerks to smite us! 



SHANDYGAFF 27 

But Marquis is more than the arbiter of dainty 
elegances in rhyme: he sings and celebrates a 
robust world where men struggle upward from the 
slime and discontent leaps from star to star. The 
evolutionary theme is a favourite with him: the 
grand pageant of humanity groping from Pilt- 
down to Beacon Hill, winning in a million years 
two precarious inches of forehead. Much more 
often than F. P. A., who used to be his brother 
colyumist in Manhattan, he dares to disclose the 
real earnestness that underlies his chaff. 

I suppose that the conductor of a daily humor- 
ous column stands in the hierarchy of unthanked 
labourers somewhere between a plumber and a 
submarine trawler. Most of the available wheezes 
were pulled long ago by Plato in the Republic 
(not the New Republic) or by Samuel Butler in 
his Notebooks. Contribs come valiantly to hand 
with a barrowful of letters every day — ("The rav- 
ings fed him" as Don captioned some contrib's 
quip about Simeon Stylites living on a column); 
but nevertheless the direct and alternating current 
must be turned on six times a week. His jocular 
exposal of the colyumist's trade secret compares it 
to the boarding-house keeper's rotation of crops : 

Monday. Take up an idea in a serious way. (Roast Beef.) 
Tuesday. Some one writes us a letter about Monday's 
serious idea. (Cold Roast Beef.) 



28 SHANDYGAFF 

Wednesday. Josh the idea we took up seriously on Monday. 
(Beef Stew.) 

Thursday. Some one takes issue with us for Wednesday's 
josh of Monday's serious idea. (Beefsteak Pie.) 

Friday. We become a little pensive about our Wednesday's 
josh of Monday's serious idea — there creeps into our copy 
a more subdued, sensible note, as if we were acknowledging 
that after all, the main business of life is not mere hare- 
brained word-play. (Hash or Croquettes With Green 
Peppers.) 

Saturday. Spoof the whole thing again, especially spoofing 
ourself for having ever taken it seriously. (Beef Soup 
With Barley in It.) 

Sunday. There isn't any evening paper on Sunday. That 
is where we have the advantage of the boarding-house 
keepers. 



But the beauty of Don's cuisine is that the 
beef soup with barley always tastes as good as, or 
even better than, the original roast. His dry 
battery has generated in the past few years a 
dozen features with real voltage — the Savage 
Portraits, Hermione, Archy the Vers Libre Cock- 
roach, the Aptronymic Scouts, French Without a 
Struggle, Suggestions to Popular Song Writers, 
Our Own Wall Mottoes, and the sequence of 
Prefaces (to an Almanac, a Mileage Book, The 
Plays of Euripides, a Diary, a Book of Fishhooks, 
etc.). Some of Marquis's most admirable and 
delicious fooling has been poured into these Pref- 



SHANDYGAFF 29 

aces: I hope that he will put them between 
book-covers. 

One day I got a letter from a big engineering 
firm in Ohio, enclosing a number of pay-envelopes 
(empty). They wanted me to examine the 
aphorisms and oris^^wettmardenisms.~they had 
been printing on their weekly envelopes, for the 
inspiration and pejpjpjaizing of their employees. 
They had been using quotations from Emerson, 
McAdoo, and other panjiellenists, and had run 
out of "sentiments." They wanted suggestions 
as to where they could find more. 

I advised them to get in touch with Don Mar- 
quis. I don't know whether they did so or not; 
but Don's epigrams and bon mots would adorn 
any pay-envelope anthology. Some of his casual 
comments on whiskey would do more to discourage 
the decanterbury pilgrims than a bushel of tracts. 

By the time a bartender knows what drink a man will have 
before he orders, there is little else about him worth knowing. 

If you go to sleep while you are loafing, how are you going 
to know you are loafing? 

Because majorities are often wrong it does not follow that 
minorities are always right. 

Young man, if she asks you if you like her hair that way, 
beware. The woman has already committed matrimony in 
her own heart. 

I am tired of being a promising young man. I've been 
a promising young man for twenty years. 



SO SHANDYGAFF 

In most of Don Marquis's japes, a still small voice 
speaks in the mirthquake: 

If you try too hard to get a thing, you don't get it. 

If you sweat and strain and worry the other ace will not 
come — the little ball will not settle upon the Tight number 
or the proper colour — the girl will marry the other man — the 
public will cry, Bedamned to him ! he can't write anyhow ! — 
the cosmos will refuse its revelations of divinity — the Welsh 
rabbit will be stringy — you will find there are not enough 
rhymes in the language to finish your ballade — the primrose 
by the river's brim will be only a hayfever carrier — and your 
fountain pen will dribble ink upon your best trousers. 

But Don Marquis's mind has two yolks (to use 
one of his favourite denunciations) . In addition to 
these comic or satiric shadows, the gnomon of his 
Sun Dial may be relied on every now and then to 
register a clear-cut notation of the national mind 
and heart. For instance this, just after the 
United States severed diplomatic relations with 
Germany: 

This Beast we know, whom time brings to his last rebirth 

Bull-thewed, iron-boned, cold-eyed and strong as Earth. . . 

As Earth, who spawned and lessoned him, 

Yielded her earthy secrets, gave him girth, 

Armoured the skull and braced the heavy limb — 

Who frowned above him, proud and grim, 

While he sucked from her salty dugs the lore 

Of fire and steel and stone and war: 

She taught brute facts, brute might, but not the worth 



SHANDYGAFF 31 

Of spirit, honour and clean mirth .... 
His shape is Man, his mood is Dinosaur. 

Up from the wild red Welter of the past 
Foaming he comes: let this rush be his last. 

Too patient we have been, thou knowest, God, thou knowest. 

We have been slow as doom. Our dead 

Of yesteryear lie on the ocean's bed — 

We have denied each pleading ghost — 

We have been slow: God, make us sure. 

We have been slow. Grant we endure 

Unto the uttermost, the uttermost. 

Did our slow mood, O God, with thine accord? 
Then weld our diverse millions, Lord, 
Into one single swinging sword. 

I have been combing over the files of the Sun 
Dial, and it is disheartening to see these deposits 
of pearl and pie-crust, this sediment of fine mind, 
buried full fathom five in the yellowing archives 
of a newspaper. I thought of De Quincey's fa- 
mous utterance about the press: 

Worlds of fine thinking lie buried in that vast abyss, never 
to be disentombed or restored to human admiration. Like 
the sea, it has swallowed treasures without end, that no 
diving-bell will bring up again. 

Greatly as we cherish the Sun Dial, we are 
jealous of it for sapping all its author's time and 



32 SHANDYGAFF 

calories. No writer in America has greater or 
more meaty, stalwart gifts. Don, we cry, spend 
less time stoking that furnace out in Port Wash- 
ington, and more on your novels! 

There is no more convincing proof of the success 
of the Sun Dial than the roster of its contributors. 
Some of the most beautiful lyrics of the past few 
years have been printed there (I think partic- 
ularly of two or three by Padraic Colum). In 
this ephemeral column of a daily newspaper some 
of the rarest singers and keenest wits of the time 
have been glad to exhibit their wares, without 
pay of course. It would be impossible to give a 
complete list, but among them are William Rose 
Benet, Clinton Scollard, Edith M. Thomas, 
Benjamin De Casseres, Gelett Burgess, Georgia 
Pangborn, Charles Hanson Towne, Clement Wood. 

But the tragedy of the colyumist's task is that 
the better he does it the harder it becomes. 
People simply will not leave him alone. All day 
long they drop into his office, or call him up on the 
phone \n the hope of getting into the column. 
Poor Don! he has become an institution down on 
Nassau Street: whatever hour of the day you call, 
you wilL find his queue there chivvying him. He 
is too gracious to throw them out: his only expe- 
dient is to take them over to the gin cathedral 
across the street and buy them a drink. Lately 



SHANDYGAFF S3 

the poor wretch has had to write his Dial out in 
the pampas of Long Island, bringing it in with him 
in the afternoon, in order to get it done undis- 
turbed. How many times I have sworn never to 
bother him again! And yet, when one is passing 
in that neighbourhood, the temptation is irresis- 
tible. ... I dare say Ben Jonson had the 
same trouble. Of course someone ought to en- 
dow Don and set him permanently at the head 
of a chophouse table, presiding over a kind of 
Mermaid coterie of robust wits. He is a master 
of the tavernacular. 

He is a versatile cove. Philosopher, satirist, 
burlesquer, poet, critic, and novelist. Perhaps the 
three critics in this country whose praise is best 
worth having, and least easy to win, would be 
Marquis, Strunsky, and O. W. Firkins. And I 
think that the three leading poets male in this 
country to-day are Marquis, William Rose Benet, 
and (perhaps) Vachel Lindsay. Of course Don 
Marquis has an immense advantage over Will 
Benet in his stoutness. Will had to feed up on 
honey and candied apricocks and mares' milk for 
months before they would admit him to the army. 

Hermione and her little group of "Serious 
Thinkers" have attained the dignity of book 
publication, and now stand on the shelf beside 
"Danny's Own Story" and "The Cruise of the 



34 SHANDYGAFF 

Jasper B." This satire on the azure-pedalled 
coteries of Washington Square has perhaps 
received more publicity than any other of Mar- 
quis's writings, but of all Don's drolleries I reserve 
my chief affection for Archy. The cockroach, en- 
dowed by some freak of transmigration with the 
shining soul of a vers libre poet, is a thoroughly 
Marquisian whimsy. I make no apology for quot- 
ing this prince of blattidae at some length. Many 
a commuter, opening his evening paper on the 
train, looks first of all to see if Archy 
is in the Dial. I love Archy because 
there seems to me something thoroughly racial 
and native and American about him. Can you 
imagine him, for instance, in Punch? His author 
has never told us which one of the vers libre poets 
it is whose soul has emigrated into Archy, but I 
feel sure it is not Ezra Pound or any of the expat- 
riated eccentrics who lisp in odd numbers in the 
King's Road, Chelsea. Could it be Amy Lowell? 
Perhaps it should be explained that Archy 's 
carelessness as to punctuation and capitals is not 
mere ostentation, but arises from the fact that he 
is not strong enough to work the shift key of his 
typewriter. Ingenious readers of the Sun Dial 
have suggested many devices to make this pos- 
sible, but none that seem feasible to the roach 
himself. 



SHANDYGAFF 



35 



The Argument: Archy, the vers libre cock- 
roach, overhears a person with whiskers and 
dressed in the uniform of a butler in the British 
Navy, ask a German waiter if the pork pie is 
built. Ja, Ja, replies the waiter. Archy's sus- 
picions are awakened, and he climbs into the pork 
pie through an air hole, and .prepares his soul for 
parlous times. The naval butler takes the pie 
on board a launch, and Archy, watching through 
one of the portholes of the pastry, sees that they 
are picked up by a British cruiser "an inch or two 
outside the three-mile line." (This was in neutral 
days, remember.) Archy continues the narrative, 
in lower case agate: 



it is cuthbert with the pork pie the 
captain has been longing for said a voice 
and on every side 

rang shouts of the pie the pie the cap- 
tains pie has come at last and a salute 
of nineteen 

guns was fired the pie was carried at 
once to the 

captains mess room where the captain 
a grizzled veteran sat with 
knife and fork in hand and serviette 
tucked 

under his chin i knew cried the captain 
that if there was a 

pork pie in america my faithful cuthbert 
would 

find it for me the butler bowed and all 
the 

ships officers pulled up their chairs 
to the 

table with a rasping sound you may 
serve it honest 

cuthbert said the captain impatiently 
and the butler broke a 
hole in the top crust he touched a hidden 
mechanism for 

immediately something right under me 
began to 

go tick tock tick tock tick tock what is 
that noise captain said the larboard 
mate only the patent log 



clicking off the knots said the butler "<■ 

it needs oiling again but M 

cuthbert said the captain why are you 

so 

nervous and what means that flush upon 

your face 

that flush your honor is chicken pox 

said cuthbert i am 

subject to sudden attacks of it 

unhand that pie cried the ships surgeon 

leaping to his feet 

arrest that butler he is a teuton spy 

that is not chicken pox at all it is ger- 

man measles 

ha ha cried the false butler the ship is 

doomed there is a clock work bomb in 

this pie my name 

is not cuthbert it is friedrich and he 



through a port into the sea his blonde 
side whiskers 

which were false falling off as he did so 
ha ha rang his 

mocking laughter from the ocean as he 
pulled shoreward with 
long strokes your ship is doomed my god 
said the 

senior boatswain what shall we do stop 
the 

clock ordered the captain but i had al- 
ready done so i 



36 SHANDYGAFF 

braced my head against the hour hand and gave me a hypodermic of some pow- 

and my feet erful east 

against the minute hand and stopped the indian drug which stiffened me like a 

mechanism the captain cataleptic but i 

drew his sword and pried off all the top could still see and hear for days and 

crust gentlemen days a council 

he said yonder cockroach has saved the of war was held about me every after- 
ship noon and wireless 

let us throw the pie overboard and steam reports sent to london save the cock- 
rapidly away from roach even if 

it advised the starboard ensign you lose the ship wirelessed the admir- 

not so not so cried the captain yon gal- alty england must 

lant cockroach stand by the smaller nations and every 

must not perish so gratitude is a tradi- hour the 

tion of the surgeon gave me another hypodermic 

british navy i would sooner perish with at the end 

him than of four weeks the cabin boy who had 

desert him all the time the strain was been 

getting thinking deeply all the time suggested 

worse on me if my feet slipped the clock that a plug of 

would start again wood be inserted in my place which was 

and all would be lost beads of sweat done 

rolled down my forehead and almost and i fell to the deck well nigh ex- 
blinded me something hausted the next 

must be done quick said the first assist- day i was set on shore in the captains 

ant captain the gig and 

insect is losing his rigidity wait said the here i am. 
surgeon archy 

So far as I know, America has made just two 
entirely original contributions to the world's types 
of literary and dramatic art. These are the 
humorous colyum and the burlesque show. The 
saline and robust repartee of the burlicue is 
ancient enough in essence, but it is compounded 
into a new and uniquely American mode, joy- 
ously flavoured with Broadway garlic. The news- 
paper colyum, too, is a native product. Whether 
Ben Franklin or Eugene Field invented it, it bears 
the image and superscription of America. 

And using the word ephemeral in its strict sense, 
Don Marquis is unquestionably the cleverest of our 
ephemeral philosophers. This nation suffers a 
good deal from lack of humour in high places: 



SHANDYGAFF 87 

our Great Pachyderms have all Won their Way 
to the Top by a Resolute Struggle. But Don 
has just chuckled and gone on refusing to answer 
letters or fill out Mr. Purinton's blasphemous 
efficiency charts or join the Poetry Society or 
attend community masques. And somehow all 
these things seem to melt away, and you look 
round the map and see Don Marquis taking up 
all the scenery. . . . He has such an oecu- 
menical kind of humour. It's just as true in 
Brooklyn as it is in the Bronx. 

He is at his best when he takes up some philo- 
sophic dilemma, or some quaint abstraction (viz., 
Certainty, Predestination, Idleness, Uxoricide, Pro- 
hibition, Compromise, or Cornutation) and sets 
the idea spinning. Beginning slowly, carelessly, in 
a deceptive, offhand manner, he lets the toy revolve 
as it will. Gradually the rotation accelerates; 
faster and faster he twirls the thought (sometimes 
losing a few spectators whose centripetal powers 
are not stanch enough) until, chuckling, he holds 
up the flashing, shimmering conceit, whirling 
at top speed and ejaculating sparks. What is so 
beautiful as a rapidly revolving idea? Marquis's 
mind is like a gyroscope: the faster it spins, the 
steadier it is. There are laws of dynamics in 
colyums just as anywhere else. 

What is there in the nipping air of Galesburgf, 



38 SHANDYGAFF 

Illinois, that turns the young sciolists of Knox 
College toward the rarefied ethers of literature? 
S. S. McClure, John Phillips, Ralph Waldo Trine, 
Don Marquis — are there other Knox men in the 
game, too? Marquis was studying at Galesburg 
about the time of the Spanish War. He has 
worked on half a dozen newspapers, and assisted 
Joel Chandler Harris in editing "Uncle Remus's 
Magazine." But let him tell his biography in his 
own words: 

Born July 29, 1878, at Walnut, Bureau Co., 111., a mem- 
ber of the Republican party. 

My father was a physician, and I had all the diseases of the 
time and place free of charge. 

Nothing further happened to me until, in the summer of 
1896, I left the Republican party to follow the Peerless 
Leader to defeat. 

In 1900 I returned to the Republican party to accept a 
position in the Census Bureau, at Washington, D. C. This 
position I filled for some months in a way highly satisfactory 
to the Government in power. It is particularly gratifying 
to me to remember that one evening, after I had worked 
unusually hard at the Census Office, the late President 
McKinley himself nodded and smiled to me as I passed 
through the White House grounds on my way home from toil. 
He had heard of my work that day, I had no doubt, and this 
was his way of showing me how greatly he appreciated it. 

Nevertheless, shortly after President McKinley paid this 
public tribute to the honesty, efficiency and importance of 
my work in the Census Office, I left the Republican party 



SHANDYGAFF 39 

again, and accepted a position as reporter on a Washington 
paper. 

Upon entering the newspaper business all the troubles of 
my earlier years disappeared as if by magic, and I have 
lived the contented, peaceful, unworried life of the average 
newspaper man ever since. 

There is little more to tell. In 1916 I again returned to the 
Republican party. This time it was for the express purpose 
of voting against Mr. Wilson. Then Mr. Hughes was 
nominated, and I left the Republican party again. 

This is the outline of my life in its relation to the times in 
which I live. For the benefit of those whose curiosity extends 
to more particular details, I add a careful pen-picture of 
myself. 

It seems more modest, somehow, to put it in the third 
person: 

j/Height, 5 feet 10§ inches; hair, dove-coloured; scar on little 
finger of left hand; has assured carriage, walking boldly into 
good hotels and mixing with patrons on terms of equality; 
weight, 200 pounds; face slightly asymmetrical, but not 
definitely criminal in type; loathes Japanese art, but likes 
beefsteak and onions; wears No. 8 shoe; fond of Francis Thomp- 
son's poems; inside seam of trousers, 32 inches; imitates cats, 
dogs and barnyard animals for the amusement of young 
children; eyetooth in right side of upper jaw missing; has 
always been careful to keep thumb prints from possession 
of police; chest measurement, 42 inches, varying with respira- 
tion; sometimes wears glasses, but usually operates undis- 
guised; dislikes the works of Rabindranath Tagore; corn on 
little toe of right foot; superstitious, especially with regard 
to psychic phenomena; eyes, blue; does not use drugs nor 
read his verses to women's clubs; ruddy complexion; no 
photograph in possession of police; garrulous and argumen- 



40 SHANDYGAFF 

tative; prominent cheek bones; avoids Bohemian society, 
so-called, and has never been in a thieves' kitchen, a broker's 
office nor a class of short-story writing; wears 17- inch collar; 
waist measurement none of your business; favourite disease, 
hypochondria; prefers the society of painters, actors, writers, 
architects, preachers, sculptors, publishers, editors, musi- 
cians, among whom he often succeeds in insinuating him- 
self, avoiding association with crooks and reformers as 
much as possible; walks with rapid gait; mark of old fracture 
on right shin; cuffs on trousers, and coat cut loose, with 
plenty of room under the arm pits; two hip pockets; dislikes 
Rochefort cheese, "Tom Jones," Wordsworth's poetry, 
absinthe cocktails, most musical comedy, public banquets, 
physical exercise, Billy Sunday, steam heat, toy dogs, poets 
who wear their souls outside, organized charity, magazine 
covers, and the gas company; prominent callouses on two 
fingers of right hand prevent him being expert pistol shot; 
belt straps on trousers; long upper lip; clean shaven; shaggy 
eyebrows; affects soft hats; smile, one-sided; no gold fillings 
in teeth; has served six years of indeterminate sentence in 
Brooklyn, with no attempt to escape, but is reported to 
have friends outside; voice, husky; scar above the forehead 
concealed by hair; commonly wears plain gold ring on little 
finger of left hand; dislikes prunes, tramp poets and imita- 
tions of Kipling; trousers cut loose over hips and seat; would 
likely come along quietly if arrested. 

I would fail utterly in this rambling anatomy 
if I did not insist that Don Marquis regards his 
column not merely as a soapslide but rather as a 
cudgelling ground for sham and hypocrisy. He 
has something of the quick Stevensonian instinct 



SHANDYGAFF 41 

for the moral issue, and the Devil not infrequently 
winces about the time the noon edition of the 
Evening Sun comes from the press. There is no 
man quicker to bonnet a fallacy or drop the acid 
just where it will disinfect. For instance, this 
comment on some bolshevictory in Russia: 

A kind word was recently seen, on one of the principal 
streets of Petrograd, attempting to butter a parsnip. 

For the plain man who shies at surplice and 
stole, the Sun Dial is a very real pulpit, whence, 
amid excellent banter, he hears much that is 
purging and cathartic in a high degree. The 
laughter of fat men is a ringing noble music, and 
Don Marquis, like Friar Tuck, deals texts and 
fisticuffs impartially. What an archbishop of 
Canterbury he would have made! He is a burly 
and bonny dominie, and his congregation rarely 
miss the point of the sermon. We cannot close 
better than by quoting part of his Colyumist's 
Prayer in which he admits us somewhere near 
the pulse of the machine: 

I pray Thee, make my colyum read, 
And give me thus my daily bread. 
Endow me, if Thou grant me wit, 
Likewise with sense to mellow it. 
Save me from feeling so much hate 
My food will not assimilate; 



42 SHANDYGAFF 

Open mine eyes that I may see 

Thy world with more of charity, 

And lesson me in good intents 

And make me friend of innocence. . . . 

Make me (sometimes at least) discreet; 

Help me to hide my self-conceit, 

And give me courage now and then 

To be as dull as are most men. 

And give me readers quick to see 

When I am satirizing Me. . . . 

Grant that my virtues may atone 

For some small vices of mine own. 

And it is thoroughly characteristic of Don 
Marquis that he follows his prayer with this 
comment : 

People, when they pray, usually pray not for what they 
really want — and intend to have if they can get it — but for 
what they think the Creator wants them to want. We made 
a certain attempt to be sincere in the above verses; but even 
at that no doubt a lot of affectation crept in. 



THE ART OF WALKING 

Away with the stupid adage about a man being as old as his 

arteries! 
He is as old as his calves — his garteries. . . . 

— Meditations of Andrew McGill. 

THERE was fine walking on the hills in the 
direction of the sea." 
This heart-stirring statement, which I 
find in an account of the life of William and 
Dorothy Wordsworth when they inhabited a 
quiet cottage near Crewkerne in Dorset, reminds 
me how often the word "walking" occurs in any 
description of Wordsworth's existence. De 
Quincey assures us that the poet's props were very 
ill shapen — "they were pointedly condemned by 
all female connoisseurs in legs" — but none the less 
he was princeps arte ambulandi. Even had he 
lived to-day, when all our roads are barbarized by 
exploding gasoline vapours, I do not think Words- 
worth would have flivvered. Of him the Opium 
Eater made the classic pronouncement: "I cal- 
culate that with these identical legs W. must have 
traversed a distance of 175,000 to 180,000 English 

43 



44 SHANDYGAFF 

miles — a mode of exertion which, to him, stood 
in the stead of alcohol and all other stimulants 
whatsoever to the animal spirits; to which, 
indeed, he was indebted for a life of unclouded 
happiness, and we for much of what is most ex- 
cellent in his writings." 

A book that .says anything about walking has 
a ready passage to my inmost heart. The best 
books are always those that set down with "amor- 
ous precision" the satisfying details of human 
pilgrimage. How one sympathizes with poor 
Pepys in his outburst (April 30, 1663) about a 
gentleman who seems to have been "Always 
Taking the Joy Out of Life": 

Lord ! what a stir Stankes makes, with his being crowded 
in the streets, and wearied in walking in London, and would 
not be wooed to go to a play, nor to Whitehall, or to see the 
lions, though he was carried in a coach. I never could have 
thought there had been upon earth a man so little curious in 
the world as he is. 

Now your true walker is mightily "curious in 
the world," and he goes upon his way zealous to 
sate himself with a thousand quaintnesses. When 
he writes a book he fills it full of food, drink, 
tobacco, the scent of sawmills on sunny after- 
noons, and arrivals at inns late at night. He 
writes what Mr. Mosher calls a book-a-bosom. 



SHANDYGAFF 45 

Diaries and letters are often best of all because 
they abound in these matters. And because walk- 
ing can never again be what it was — the motor- 
cars will see to that — it is our duty to pay it 
greater reverence and honour. 

Wordsworth and Coleridge come first to mind 
in any talk about walking. The first time they 
met was in 1797 when Coleridge tramped from 
Nether Stowey to Racedown (thirty miles in an 
air-line, and full forty by road) to make the 
acquaintance of William and Dorothy. That is 
practically from the Bristol Channel to the Eng- 
lish ditto, a rousing stretch. It was Words- 
worth's pamphlet describing a walk across France 
to the Alps that spurred Coleridge on to this 
expedition. The trio became fast friends, and 
William and Dorothy moved to Alfoxden (near 
Nether Stowey) to enjoy the companionship. 
What one would give for some adequate account 
of their walks and talks together over the 
Quantocks. They planned a little walking trip 
into Devonshire that autumn (1797) and "The 
Ancient Mariner" was written in the hope of de- 
fraying the expenses of the adventure. 

De Quincey himself, who tells us so much 
jovial gossip about Wordsworth and Coleridge, 
was no mean pedestrian. He describes a forty- 
mile all-night walk from Bridgewater to Bristol, 



46 SHANDYGAFF 

on the evening after first meeting Coleridge. He 
could not sleep after the intellectual excitement 
of the day, and through a summer night " divinely 
calm" he busied himself with meditation on the 
sad spectacle he had witnessed: a great mind 
hastening to decay. 

I have always fancied that walking as a fine 
art was not much practised before the eighteenth 
century. We know from Ambassador Jusserand's 
famous book how many wayfarers were on the 
roads in the fourteenth century, but none of these 
were abroad for the pleasures of moving medi- 
tation and scenery. We can gather from Mr. 
Tristram's "Coaching Days and Coaching Ways" 
that the highroads were by no means safe for 
solitary travellers even so late as 1750. In 
"Joseph Andrews" (1742) whenever any of the 
characters proceed afoot they are almost certain 
to be held up. Mr. Isaac Walton, it is true, was a 
considerable rambler a century earlier than this, 
and in his Derbyshire hills must have passed many 
lonely gullies; but footpads were more likely to 
ambush the main roads. It would be a hard- 
hearted bandit who would despoil the gentle 
angler of his basket of trouts. Goldsmith, too, 
was a lusty walker, and tramped it over the Con- 
tinent for two years (1754-6) with little more 
baggage than a flute: he might have written "The 



SHANDYGAFF 47 

Handy Guide for Beggars" long before Vachel 
Lindsay. But generally speaking, it is true that 
cross-country walks for the pure delight of rhyth- 
mically placing one foot before the other were 
rare before Wordsworth. I always think of him 
as one of the first to employ his legs as an instru- 
ment of philosophy. 

After Wordsworth they come thick and fast. 
Hazlitt, of course — have you paid the tax that 
R.L.S. imposes on all who have not read Hazlitt's 
"On Going A Journey?" Then Keats: never 
was there more fruitful walk than the early morn- 
ing stroll from Clerkenwell to the Poultry in Octo- 
ber, 1816, that produced "Much have I travelled 
in the realms of gold." He must have set out 
early enough, for the manuscript of the sonnet 
was on Cowden Clarke's table by breakfast time. 
And by the way, did you know that the copy of 
Chapman's Homer which inspired it belonged to 
the financial editor of the Times? Never did finan- 
cial editor live to better purpose! 

There are many words of Keats that are a joyful 
viaticum for the walker: get these by rote in some 
membrane of memory: 

The great Elements we know of are no mean comforters: 
the open sky sits upon our senses like a sapphire crown — the 
Air is our robe of state — the Earth is our throne, and the sea 
a snighty minstrel playing before it. 



48 SHANDYGAFF 

The Victorians were great walkers. Railways 
were but striplings; inns were at their prime. 
Hark to the great names in the walker's Hall of 
Fame: Tennyson, FitzGerald, Matthew Arnold, 
Carlyle, Kingsley, Meredith, Richard Jefferies. 
What walker can ever forget the day when he 
first read "The Story of My Heart?" In my 
case it was the 24th of August, 1912, on a train 
from London to Cambridge. Then there were 
George Borrow, Emily Bronte on her Yorkshire 
moors, and Leslie Stephen, one of the princes of 
the clan and founder of the famous Sunday 
Tramps of whom Meredith was one. Walt 
Whitman would have made a notable addition 
to that posse of philosophic walkers, save that I 
fear the garrulous half-baked old barbarian would 
have been disappointed that he could not domi- 
nate the conversation. 

There have been stout walkers in our own day. 
Mr. W. H. Davies (Super-Tramp), the G. M. 
Trevelyan, Hilaire Belloc, Edward Thomas who 
died on the field of honour in April, 1917, and 
Francis Ledwidge, who was killed in Flanders. 
Who can forget his noble words, "I have taken up 
arms for the fields along the Boyne, for the birds 
and the blue sky over them." There is Walter 
Prichard Eaton, the Jefferies of our own Berk- 
shires. One could extend the list almost without 



SHANDYGAFF 49 

end. Sometimes it seems as though literature 
were a co-product of legs and head. 

Charles Lamb and Leigh Hunt were great city 
ramblers, followed in due course by Dickens, 
R.L.S., Edward Lucas, Holbrook Jackson, and 
Pearsall Smith. Mr. Thomas Burke is another, 
whose "Nights in Town" will delight the lover 
of the greatest of all cities. But urban wander- 
ings, delicious as they are, are not quite what we 
mean by walking. On pavements one goes by 
fit and start, halting to see, to hear, and to specu- 
late. In the country one captures the true ecstasy 
of the long, unbroken swing, the harmonious glow 
of mind and body, eyes fed, soul feasted, brain 
and muscle exercised alike. 

Meredith is perhaps the Supreme Pontiff of 
modern country walkers: no soft lover of drowsy 
golden weather, but master of the stiffer breed 
who salute frost and lashing rain and roaring 
southwest wind, who leap to grapple with the 
dissolving riddles of destiny. February and March 
are his months: 

For love we Earth, then serve we all; 

Her mystic secret then is ours : 
We fall, or view our treasures fall, 

Unclouded, as beholds her flowers. 

Earth, from a night of frosty wreck, 
Enrobed in morning's mounted fire, 



50 SHANDYGAFF 

When lowly, with a broken neck, 
The crocus lays her cheek to mire. 

I suppose every walker collects a few precious 
books which form the bible of his chosen art. I 
have long been collecting a Walker's Breviary 
of my own. It includes Stevenson's "Walking 
Tours," G. M. Trevelyan's "Walking," Leslie 
Stephen's "In Praise of Walking," shards and 
crystals from all the others I have mentioned. 
Michael Fairless, Vachel Lindsay, and Frank 
Sidgwick have place in it. On my private shelf 
stands "Journeys to Bagdad" by Mr. Charles 
Brooks, who has good pleasantry to utter on this 
topic; and a manly little volume, "Walking as 
Education," by the Rev. A. N. Cooper, "the 
walking parson," published in England in 1910. 
On that same shelf there will soon stand a volume 
of delicious essays by one of the most accomplished 
of American walkers, Mr. Robert Cortes Holliday, 
the American Belloc, whose "Walking Stick 
Papers" has beckoned to the eye of a far-seeing 
publisher. Mr. Holliday it is who has bravely 
stated why so few of the fair sex are able to 
participate in walking tours: 

No one, though (this j s th e fi rs t article to be observed), 
should ever go a journey with any other than him with whom 
one walks arm in arm, in the evening, the twilight, and, talk- 



SHANDYGAFF 51 

ing (let us suppose) of men's given names, agrees that if either 
should have a son he shall be named after the other. Walking 
in the gathering dusk, two and two, since the world began, 
there have always been young men who have thus to one 
another plighted their troth. If one is not still one of these, 
then, in the sense here used, journeys are over for him. What 
is left to him of life he may enjoy, but not journeys. Mention 
should be made in passing that some have been found so ignor- 
ant of the nature of journeys as to* suppose that they might 
be taken in company with members, or a member, of the 
other sex. Now, one who writes of journeys would cheerfully 
be burned at the stake before he would knowingly under- 
estimate women. But it must be confessed that it is another 
season in the life of man that they fill. 

They are too personal for the high enjoyment of going a 
journey. They must forever be thinking about you or about 
themselves; with them everything in the world is somehow 
tangled up in these matters; and when you are with them 
(you cannot help it, or if you could they would not allow it) 
you must forever be thinking about them or yourself. Noth- 
ing on either side can be seen detached. They cannot rise 
to that philosophic plane of mind which is the very marrow 
of going a journey. One reason for this is that they can never 
escape from the idea of society: You are in their society, 
they are in yours; and the multitudinous personal ties which 
connect you all to that great order called society that you 
have for a period got away from physically are present. Like 
the business man who goes on a vacation from his business 
and takes his business habits along with him, so on a journey 
they would bring society along, and all sort of etiquette. 

He that goes a journey shakes off the trammels of the world; 
he has fled all impediments and inconveniences; he belongs, 
for the moment, to no time or place. He is neither rich nor 



52 SHANDYGAFF 

poor, but in that which he thinks and sees. There is not 
such another Arcadia for this on earth as in going a journey. 
He that goes a journey escapes, for a breath of air, from all 
conventions; without which, though, of course, society would 
go to pot; and which are the very natural instinct of women. 

Mr. Holliday has other goodly matter upon the 
philosophy and art of locomotion, and those who 
are wise and have a lively faith may be admitted 
to great and surpassing delights if they will here 
and now make memorandum to buy his book, 
which will soon be published. 

Speaking of Vachel Lindsay, his "Handy 
Guide for Beggars" will bring an itch along the 
shanks of those who love shoe-leather and a 
knobbed stick. Vachel sets out for a walk in no 
mean and pettifogging spirit: he proceeds as an 
army with banners: he intends that the world 
shall know he is afoot: the Great Khan of Spring- 
field is unleashed — let alewives and deacons 
tremble! 

Ungenerous hosts have cozened Vachel by beg- 
ging him to recite his poems at the beginning of 
each course, in the meantime getting on with 
their eating; but despite the naivete of his eager- 
ness to sing, there is a plain and manly simplicity 
about Vachel that delights us all. We like to 
know that here is a poet who has wrestled with 
poverty, who never wrote a Class Day poem at 



SHANDYGAFF 53 

Harvard, who has worn frayed collars or none at 
all, and who lets the barber shave the back of 
his neck. We like to know that he has tramped 
the ties in Georgia, harvested in Kansas, been 
fumigated in New Jersey, and lives contented in 
Illinois. Four weeks a year he lives as the darling 
of the cisalleghany Browning Societies, but he is 
always glad to get back to Springfield and resume 
his robes as the local Rabindranath. If he ever 
buys an automobile I am positive it will be a 
Ford. Here is homo americanus, one of our- 
selves, who never wore spats in his life. 

But even the plain man may see visions. 
Walking on crowded city streets at night, watch- 
ing the lighted windows, delicatessen shops, pea- 
nut carts, bakeries, fish stalls, free lunch counters 
piled with crackers and saloon cheese, and minor 
poets struggling home with the Saturday night 
marketing — he feels the thrill of being one, or 
at least two-thirds, with this various, grotesque, 
pathetic, and surprising humanity. The sense 
of fellowship with every other walking biped, the 
full-blooded understanding that Whitman and O. 
Henry knew in brimming measure, comes by 
gulps and twinges to almost all. That is the 
essence of Lindsay's feeling about life. He loves 
crowds, companionship, plenty of sirloin and 
onions, and seeing his name in print. He sings 



54 SHANDYGAFF 

and celebrates the great symbols of our hodge- 
podge democracy: ice cream soda, electrical sky- 
signs, Sunday School picnics, the movies, Mark 
Twain. In the teeming ooze and ocean bottoms 
of our atlantic humanity he finds rich corals and 
rainbow shells, hospitality, reverence, love, and 
beauty. 

This is the sentiment that makes a merry 
pedestrian, and Vachel has scrutineered and scuf- 
fled through a dozen states, lightening larders 
and puzzling the worldly. Afoot and penniless 
is his technique — "stopping when he had a mind 
to, singing when he felt inclined to" — and beg- 
ging his meals and bed. I suppose he has had 
as many free meals as any American citizen; and 
this is how he does it, copied from his little pam- 
phlet used on many a road: 

RHYMES TO BE TRADED FOR BREAD 

Being new verses by Nicholas Vachel Lindsay, Springfield, 
Illinois, June, 1912, printed expressly as a substitute for money. 

This book is to be used in exchange for the necessities of 
life on a tramp- journey from the author's home town, through 
the West and back, during which he will observe the [following 
rules: 

(1) Keep away from the cities. 

(2) Keep away from the railroads. 

(3) Have nothing to do with money. Carry no baggage. 

(4) Ask for dinner about quarter after eleven. 



SHANDYGAFF 55 

(5) Ask for supper, lodging, and breakfast about quarter 
of five. 

(6) Travel alone. 

(7) Be neat, truthful, civil, and on the square. 

(8) Preach the Gospel of Beauty. 

In order to carry out the last rule there will be three excep- 
tions to the rule against baggage. (1) The author will 
carry a brief printed statement, called "The Gospel of 
Beauty." (2) He will carry this book of rhymes for distri- 
bution. (3) Also he will carry a small portfolio with pic- 
tures, etc., chosen to give an outline of his view of the history 
of art, especially as it applies to America. 

Perhaps I have tarried too long over Vachel; 
but I have set down his theories of vagabonding 
because many walkers will find them interesting. 
"The Handy Guide for Beggars" will leave you 
footsore but better for the exercise. And when 
the fascinating story of American literature in 
this decade (1910-20) is finally written, there will 
be a happy and well-merited corner in it for a 
dusty but "neat, truthful, and civil" figure from 
Springfield, Illinois. 

A good pipeful of prose to solace yourself 
withal, about sunset on a lonely road, is that 
passage on "Lying Awake at Night" to be found 
in "The Forest," by Stewart Edward White. 
Major White is one of the best friends the open- 
air walker has, and don't forget it! 

The motors have done this for us at least, that 



56 SHANDYGAFF 

as they have made the highways their own be- 
yond dispute, walking will remain the mystic 
and private pleasure of the secret and humble few. 
For us the byways, the footpaths, and the pas- 
tures will be sanctified and sweet. Thank 
heaven there are still gentle souls uncorrupted 
by the victrola and the limousine. In our old 
trousers and our easy shoes, with pipe and stick, 
we can do our fifteen miles between lunch and 
dinner, and glorify the ways of God to man. 

And sometimes, about two o'clock of an after- 
noon (these spells come most often about half an 
hour after lunch), the old angel of peregrination 
lifts himself up in me, and I yearn and wamble for 
a season afoot. When a blue air is moving 
keenly through bare boughs this angel is most 
vociferous. I gape wanly round the lofty citadel 
where I am pretending to earn the Monday 
afternoon envelope. The filing case, thermostat, 
card index, typewriter, automatic telephone: 
these ingenious anodynes avail me not. Even 
the visits of golden nymphs, sweet ambassadors 
of commerce, who rustle in and out of my room 
with memoranda, mail, manuscripts, aye, even 
these lightfoot figures fail to charm. And the 
mind goes out to the endless vistas of streets, 
roads, fields, and rivers that summon the wanderer 
with laughing voice. Somewhere a great wind is 



SHANDYGAFF 57 

scouring the hillsides; and once upon a time a 
man set out along the Great North Road to walk 
to Roys ton in the rain. . . . 

Grant us, Zeus ! the tingling tremour of thigh 
and shank that comes of a dozen sturdy miles laid 
underheel. Grant us "fine walking on the hills 
in the direction of the sea"; or a winding road that 
tumbles down to some Cotswold village. Let an 
inn parlour lie behind red curtains, and a table be 
drawn toward the fire. Let there be a loin of cold 
beef, an elbow of yellow cheese, a tankard of dog's 
nose. Then may we prop our Bacon's Essays 
against the pewter and study those mellow words : 
*' Certainly it is heaven upon earth to have a man's 
mind move in charity, rest in providence, and 
turn upon the poles of truth." Haec studia per- 
noctant nobiscum, peregrinantur, rusticantur. 



RUPERT BROOKE 

RUPERT Brooke had the oldest pith of 
England in his fibre. He was born of 
k East Anglia, the original vein of English 
blood. Ruddy skin, golden-brown hair, blue eyes, 
are the stamp of the Angles. Walsingham, in Nor- 
folk, was the home of the family. His father 
was a master at Rugby; his grandfather a canon 
in the church. 

In 1913 Heffer, the well-known bookseller 
and publisher of Cambridge, England, issued 
a little anthology called Cambridge Poems 
1900-1913. This volume was my first intro- 
duction to Brooke. As an undergraduate at 
Oxford during the years 1910-13 I had heard 
of his work from time to time; but I think we 
youngsters at Oxford were too absorbed in our 
own small versemakings to watch very carefully 
what the "Tabs" were doing. His poem The 
Old Vicarage, Grantchester, reprinted in Heffer's 
Cambridge Poems, first fell under my eye during 
the winter of 1913-14. 

Grantchester is a tiny hamlet just outside Cam- 
bridge; set in the meadows along the Cam or Granta 
(the earlier name), and next door to the Trump- 

58 



SHANDYGAFF 59 

ington of Chaucer's "The Reeve's Tale." All 
that Cambridge country is flat and comparatively 
uninteresting; patch worked with chalky fields 
bright with poppies; slow, shallow streams drifting 
between pollard willows;, it is the beginning of the 
fen district, and from the brow of the Royston 
downs (thirteen miles away) it lies as level as a 
table-top with the great chapel of King's clear 
against the sky. It is the favourite lament of 
Cambridge men that their "Umgebung" is so dull 
and monotonous compared with the rolling witch- 
ery of Oxfordshire. 

But to the young Cantab sitting over his beer at 
the Cafe des Westens in Berlin, the Cambridge 
villages seemed precious and fair indeed. jBalanc- 
ing between genuine homesickness for the green 
pools of the Cam, and a humorous whim in his 
rhymed comment on the outlying villages, Brooke 
wrote the Grantchester poem; and probably 
when the fleeting pang of nostalgia was over 
enjoyed the evening in Berlin hugely. But the 
verses are more than of merely passing interest. 
To one who knows that neighbourhood the picture 
is cannily vivid. To me it brings back with pain- 
ful intensity the white winding road from Cam- 
bridge to Royston which I have bicycled hundreds 
of times. One sees the little inns along the way 
— the Waggon and Horses, the Plough, the King's 



60 SHANDYGAFF 

Arms — and the recurring blue signboard Fine Roy- 
ston Ales (the Royston brewery being famous in 
those parts). Behind the fun there shines 
Brooke's passionate devotion to the soil and soul 
of England which was to reach its final expression 
so tragically soon. And even behind this the 
immortal questions of youth which have no 
country and no clime — 

Say, is there Beauty yet to find? 

And Certainty? and Quiet kind? 

No lover of England, certainly no lover of 
Cambridge, is likely to forget the Grantchester 
poem. But knowing Brooke only by that, one 
may perhaps be excused for having merely ticketed 
him as one of the score of young varsity poets 
whom Oxford and Cambridge had graduated in 
the past decade and who are all doing fine and 
promising work. Even though he tarried here 
in the United States ("El Cuspidorado," as he 
wittily observed) and many hold precious the 
memory of his vivid mind and flashing face, to 
most of us he was totally unknown. Then came 
the War; he took part in the unsuccessful Antwerp 
Expedition; and while in training for the iEgean 
campaign he wrote the five sonnets entitled 
"1914." I do not know exactly when they were 
written or where first published. Their great 
popularity began when the Dean of St. Paul's 



SHANDYGAFF 61 

quoted from them in a sermon on Easter Day, 
1915, alluding to them as the finest expression of 
the English spirit that the War had called forth. 
They came to New York in the shape of clippings 
from the London Times. No one could read the 
matchless sonnet: 

"If I should die, think only this of me: 

That there's some corner of a foreign field 
That is for ever England." 

and not be thrilled to the quick. A country doc- 
tor in Ohio to whom I sent a copy of the sonnet 
wrote "I cannot read it without tears." This was 
poetry indeed; like the Scotchman and his house, 
we kent it by the biggin o't. I suppose many 
another stranger must have done as I did: wrote 
to Brooke to express gratitude for the perfect 
words. But he had sailed for the Mediterranean 
long before. Presently came a letter from London 
saying that he had died on the very day of my 
letter — April 23, 1915. He died on board the 
French hospital ship Duguay-Trouin, on Shake- 
speare's birthday, in his 28th year. One gathers 
from the log of the hospital-ship that the cause of 
his death was a malignant ulcer, due to the sting 
of some venomous fly. He had been weakened 
by a previous touch of sunstroke. 

A description of the burial is given in "Me- 
morials of Old Rugbeians Who Fell in the Great 



62 SHANDYGAFF 

War." It vividly recalls Stevenson's last journey 
to the Samoan mountain top which Brooke him- 
self had so recently visited. The account was 
written by one of Brooke's comrades, who has 
since been killed in action: 

We found a most lovely place for his grave, about a mile 
up the valley from the sea, an olive grove above a watercourse, 
dry now, but torrential in winter. Two mountains flank it 
on either side, and Mount Khokilas is at its head. We chose 
a place in the most lovely grove I have ever seen, or imagined, 
a little glade of about a dozen trees, carpeted with mauve- 
flowering sage. Over its head droops an olive tree, and round 
it is a little space clear of all undergrowth. 

About a quarter past nine the funeral party arrived and 
made their way up the steep, narrow, and rocky path that 
leads to the grave. The way was so rough and uncertain that 
we had to have men with lamps every twenty yards to guide 
the bearers. He was borne by petty officers of his own com- 
pany, and so slowly did they go that it was not till nearly 
eleven that they reached the grave. 

We buried him by cloudy moonlight. He wore his uniform, 
and on the coffin were his helmet, belt, and pistol (he had no 
sword). We lined the grave with flowers and olive, and 
Colonel Quilter laid an olive wreath on the coffin. The 
chaplain who saw him in the afternoon read the service very 
simply. The firing party fired three volleys and the bugles 
sounded the "Last Post." 

And so we laid him to rest in that lovely valley, his head 
towards those mountains that he would have loved to know, 
and his feet towards the sea. He once said in chance talk 
that he would like to be buried in a Greek island. He could 



SHANDYGAFF 63 

have no lovelier one than Skyros, and no quieter resting 
place. 

On his grave we heaped great blocks of white marble; the 
men of his company made a great wooden cross for his head, 
with his name upon it, and his platoon put a smaller one at 
his feet. On the back of the large cross our interpreter 
wrote in Greek. . . . "Here lies the servant of God, 
sub-lieutenant in the English navy, who died for the deliver- 
ance of Constantinople from the Turks." 

The next morning we sailed, and had no chance of revisit- 
ing his grave. 

It is no mere flippancy to say that the War did 
much for Rupert Brooke . The boy who had written 
many hot, morbid, immature verses and a handful 
of perfect poetry, stands now by one swift transla- 
tion in the golden cloudland of English letters. 
There will never, can never, be any laggard note in 
the praise of his work. And of a young poet dead 
one may say things that would be too fulsome for 
life. Professor Gilbert Murray is quoted: 

"Among all who have been poets and died 
young, it is hard to think of one who, both in life 
and death, has so typified the ideal radiance of 
youth and poetry." 

In the grave among the olive trees on the island 
of Skyros, Brooke found at least one Certainty — 
that of being "among the English poets." He 
would probably be the last to ask a more high- 
sounding epitaph. 



64 SHANDYGAFF 

His "Collected Poems" as published consist of 
eighty-two pieces, fifty of which were published in his 
first book, issued (in England only) in 1911. That is 
to say fifty of the poems were written before the 
age of 24, and seventeen of the fifty before 21. 
These last are thoroughly youthful in formula. 
We all go through the old familiar cycle, and 
Brooke did not take his youth at second hand. 
Socialism, vegetarianism, bathing by moonlight 
in the Cam, sleeping out of doors, walking bare- 
foot on the crisp English turf, channel crossings 
and what not — it is all a part of the grand game. 
We can only ask that the man really see what 
he says he sees, and report it with what grace he 
can muster. 

And so* of the seventeen earliest poems there 
need not be fulsome praise. Few of us are im- 
mortal poets by twenty-one. But even Brooke's 
undergraduate verses refused to fall entirely into 
the usual grooves of sophomore song. So unerring 
a critic as Professor Woodberry (his introduction 
to the "Collected Poems" is so good that lesser hands 
may well pause) finds in them "more of the 
intoxication of the god" than in the later rounder 
work. They include the dreaming tenderness of 
Day That I Have Loved; they include such neat 
little pictures of the gross and sordid as the two 
poems Wagner and Dawn, written on a trip in Ger- 



SHANDYGAFF 65 

many. (It is curious that the only note of exasper- 
ation in Brooke's poems occurs when he writes 
from Germany. One finds it again, wittily put, 
in Grantchester.) 

This vein of brutality and resolute ugliness that 
one finds here and there in Brooke's work is not 
wholly amiss nor unintelligible. Like all young 
men of quick blood he seized gaily upon the earthy 
basis of our humanity and found in it food for 
purging laughter. There was never a young poet 
worth bread and salt who did not scrawl ribald 
verses in his day; we may surmise that Brooke's 
peers at King's would recall many vigorous stanzas 
that are not included in the volume at hand. The 
few touches that we have in this vein show a 
masculine fear on Brooke's part of being merely 
pretty in his verse. In his young thirst for 
reality he did not boggle at coarse figures or 
loathsome metaphors. Just as his poems of 
1905-08 are of the cliche period where all lips 
are "scarlet," and lamps are "relumed," so the 
section dated 1908-11 shows Brooke in the Shrop- 
shire Lad stage, at the mercy of extravagant sex 
images, and yet developing into the dramatic 
felicity of his sonnet The Hill: 

Breathless, we flung us on the windy hill, 
Laughed in the sun, and kissed the lovely grass, 
You said, "Through glory and ecstasy we pass; 



66 SHANDYGAFF 

Wind, sun, and earth remain, the birds sing still, 
When we are old, are old. . . ." "And when we die 

All's over that is ours; and life burns on 
Through other lovers, other lips," said I, 
— "Heart of my heart, our heaven is now, is won!" 

" We are Earth's best, that learnt her lesson here. 
Life is our cry. We have kept the faith!" we said: 
"We shall go down with unreluctant tread 

Rose-crowned into the darkness!" . . . Proud we were 

And laughed, that had such brave true things to say. 

— And then you suddenly cried, and turned away. 

The true lover of poetry, it seems to me, cannot 
but wish that the "1914" sonnets and the most 
perfect of the later poems had been separately 
issued. The best of Brooke forms a thin sheaf of 
consummate beauty, and I imagine that the little 
edition of " 1914 and Other Poems," containing the 
thirty-two later poems, which was published in Eng- 
land and issued in Garden City by Doubleday, Page 
& Company in July, 1915, to save the American copy 
right, will always be more precious than the complete 
edition. As there were only twenty-five copies 
of this first American edition, it is extremely rare 
and will undoubtedly be sought after by collectors. 
But for one who is interested to trace the growth 
of Brooke's power, the steadying of his poetic 
orbit and the mounting flame of his joy in life, 
the poems of 1908-11 are an instructive study. 



SHANDYGAFF 67 

From the perfected brutality of Jealousy or Mene- 
laus and Helen or A Channel Passage (these bite 
like Meredith) we see him passing to sonnets that 
taste of Shakespeare and foretell his utter mastery 
of the form. What could better the wit and 
beauty of this song: 

"Oh! Love," they said, "is King of Kings, 

And Triumph is his crown. 
Earth fades in flame before his wings, 

And Sun and Moon bow down." 
But that, I knew, would never do; 

And Heaven is all too high. 
So whenever I meet a Queen, I said, 

I will not catch her eye. 

"Oh! Love," they said, and "Love," they said, 

"The Gift of Love is this; 
A crown of thorns about thy head, 

And vinegar to thy kiss!" — 
But Tragedy is not for me; 

And I'm content to be gay. 
So whenever I spied a Tragic Lady, 

I went another way. 

And so I never feared to see 

You wander down the street, 
Or come across the fields to me 

On ordinary feet. 
For what they'd never told me of, 

And what I never knew; 
It was that all the time, my love. 

Love would be merely you. 



68 SHANDYGAFF 

We come then to the five sonnets inspired by 
the War. Let us be sparing of clumsy comment. 
They are the living heart of young England; the 
throbbing soul of all that gracious manhood torn 
from its happy quest of Beauty and Certainty, 
flung unheated into the absurdities of War, and 
yet finding in this supreme sacrifice an answer to 
all its pangs of doubt. All the hot yearnings of 
"1905-08" and "1908-11" are gone; here is no 
Shropshire Lad enlisting for spite, but a joyous 
surrender to England of all that she had given. 
See his favourite metaphor (that of the swimmer) 
recur — what pictures it brings of "Parson's 
Pleasure" on the Cher and the willowy bathing 
pool on the Cam. How one recalls those white 
Greek bodies against the green! 

Now, God be thanked who has matched us with His hour, 
And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping, 

With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power, 
To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping. 

To those who tell us England is grown old and 
fat and soft, there is the answer. It is no hymn 
of hate that England's youth has sung, but the 
farewell of those who, loving life with infinite 
zest, have yet found in surrendering it to her the 
Beauty, the Certainty, yes and the Quiet, which 
they had sought. On those five pages are packed 



SHANDYGAFF 69 

in simple words all the love of life, the love of 
woman, the love of England that make Brooke's 
memory sweet. Never did the sonnet speak to 
finer purpose. "In his hands the thing became 
a trumpet" — 

THE DEAD 

Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead! 

There's none of these so lonely and poor of old, 
But, dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold. 

These laid the world away; poured out the red 

Sweet wine of youth; gave up the years to be 
Of work and joy, and that unhoped serene, 
That men call age; and those who would have been, 

Their sons, they gave, their immortality. 

Blow, bugles, blow! They brought us, for our dearth 
Holiness, lacked so long, and Love, and Pain. 

Honour has come back, as a King, to earth, 
And paid his subjects with a royal wage; 

And Nobleness walks in our ways again; 
And we have come into our heritage. 

It would be misleading, perhaps, to leave 
Brooke's poetry with the echo of this solemn note. 
No understanding of the man would be complete 
without mentioning the vehement gladness and 
merriment he found in all the commonplaces of life. 
Poignant to all cherishers of the precious details 
of existence must be his poem The Great Lover 



70 SHANDYGAFF 

where he catalogues a sort of trade order list of his 
stock in life. The lines speak with the very 
accent of Keats. These are some of the things 
he holds dear — 

White plates and cups, clean-gleaming, 
Ringed with blue lines; and feathery, faery dust; 
Wet roofs, beneath the lamp-light; the strong crust 
Of friendly bread; and many tasting food; 
Rainbows; and the blue bitter smoke of wood; 
And radiant raindrops couching in cool flowers; 
And flowers themselves, that sway through sunny hours, 
Dreaming of moths that drink them under the moon; 
Then, the cool kindliness of sheets, that soon 
Smoothe away trouble; and the rough male kiss 
Of blankets; grainy wood; live hair that is 
Shining and free; blue-massing clouds; the keen 
Unpassioned beauty of a great machine; 
The benison of hot water; furs to touch; 
The good smell of old clothes; and other such 
. ... All these have been my loves. 

Of his humour only those who knew him per- 
sonally have a right to speak; but where does one 
find a more perfect bit of gentle satire than Heaven 
where he gives us a Tennysonian fish pondering 
the problem of a future life. 

This life cannot be All, they swear, 
For how unpleasant, if it were! 
One may not doubt that, somehow, Good 
Shall come of Water and of Mud; 



SHANDYGAFF 71 

And, sure, the reverent eye must see 
A Purpose in Liquidity. 
We darkly know, by Faith we cry 
The future is not Wholly Dry. . . . 
But somewhere, beyond Space and Time, 
Is wetter water, slimier slime! 

No future anthology of English wit can be com- 
plete without that exquisite bit of fooling. 

Of such a sort, to use Mr. Mosher's phrase, was 
Rupert Chawner Brooke, "the latest and greatest 
of young Englishmen.'* 



THE MAN 

THE big room was very still. Outside, be- 
neath a thin, cold drizzle, the first tinge of 
green showed on the broad lawn. The 
crocuses were beginning to thrust their spears 
through the sodden mold. One of the long 
French windows stood ajar, and in the air that 
slipped through was a clean, moist whiff of com- 
ing spring. It was the end of March. 

In the leather armchair by the wide, flat desk 
sat a man. His chin was on his chest; the lowered 
head and the droop of the broad, spare shoulders 
showed the impact of some heavy burden. His 
clothes were gray — a trim, neatly cut business 
suit; his hair was gray; his gray-blue eyes were 
sombre. In the gathering dusk he seemed only a 
darker shadow in the padded chair. His right 
hand — the long, firm, nervous hand of a scholar — 
rested on the blotting pad. A silver pen had slip- 
ped from his fingers as he sat in thought. On the 
desk lay some typed sheets which he was revising. 

Sitting there, his mind had been traversing the 
memories of the past two and a half years. Every 

72 



SHANDYGAFF 73 

line of his lean, strong figure showed some trace of 
the responsibilities he had borne. In the greatest 
crisis of modern times he had steadfastly pursued 
an ideal, regardless of the bitterness of criticism and 
the sting of ridicule. The difficulties had been 
tremendous. Every kind of influence had been 
brought upon him to do certain things, none of 
which he had done. A scholar, a dreamer, a life- 
long student of history, he had surprised his associ- 
ates by the clearness of his vision, the tenacity of 
his will. Never, perhaps, in the history of the 
nation had a man been more brutally reviled than 
he — save one! And his eyes turned to the wall 
where, over the chimney piece, hung the portrait 
of one of his predecessors who had stood for his 
ideals in a time of fiery trial. It was too dark now 
to see the picture but he knew well the rugged, 
homely face, the tender, pain-wrenched mouth. 

This man had dreamed a dream. Climbing 
from the humble youth of a poor student, nour- 
ished in classroom and library with the burning 
visions of great teachers, he had hoped in this high- 
est of positions to guide his country in the difficult 
path of a higher patriotism. Philosopher, idealist, 
keen student of men, he had been able to keep his 
eyes steadfast on his goal despite the intolerable 
cloud of unjust criticism that had rolled round 
him. Venomous and shameful attacks had hurt 



74 SHANDYGAFF 

him, but had never abated his purpose. Li a 
world reeling and smoking with the insane fury 
of war, one nation should stand unshaken for the 
message of the spirit, for the glory of humanity, 
for the settlement of disputes by other means than 
gunpowder and women's tears. That was his 
dream. To that he had clung. 

He shifted grimly in his chair, and took up the 
pen. 

What a long, heart-rending strain it had been! 
His mind went back to the golden August day 
when the telegram was laid on his desk announc- 
ing that the old civilization of Europe had fallen 
into fragments. He remembered the first meet- 
ing thereafter, when his associates, with grave, 
anxious faces, debated the proper stand for them 
to take. He remembered how, in the swinging 
relaxation of an afternoon of golf, he had thought- 
fully planned the wording of his first neutrality 
proclamation. 

In those dim, far-off days, who had dreamed 
what would come? Who could have believed 
that great nations would discard without com- 
punction all the carefully built-up conventions of 
international law? That murder in the air, on 
land, on the sea, under the sea, would be rewarded 
by the highest military honours? That a sup- 
posedly friendly nation would fill another land 



SHANDYGAFF 75 

with spies — even among the accredited envoys of 
diplomacy? 

Sadly this man thought of the long painful fight 
he had made to keep one nation at least out of the 
tragic, barbaric struggle. Giving due honour to 
convinced militarist and sincere pacifist, his own 
course was still different. That his country, dis- 
regarding the old fetishes of honour and insult, 
should stand solidly for humanity; should endure 
all things, suffer all things, for humanity's sake; 
should seek to bind up the wounds and fill the starv- 
ing mouths. That one nation — not because she 
was weak, but because she was strong — should, with 
God's help, make a firm stand for peace and show 
to all mankind that force can never conquer force. 

"A nation can be so right that it should be too 
proud to fight." Magnificent words, true words, 
which one day would re-echo in history as the 
utterance of a man years in advance of his time — 
but what rolling thunders of vituperation they 
had cost him! Too proud to fight! ... If 
only it had been possible to carry through to the 
end this message from Judea ! 

But, little by little, and with growing anguish, 
he had seen that the nation must take another 
step. Little by little, as the inhuman frenzies of 
warfare had grown in savagery, inflicting unspeak- 
able horror on non-combatants, women and chil- 



76 SHANDYGAFF 

dren, lie had realized that his cherished dream 
must be laid aside. For the first time in human 
history a great nation had dared to waive pride, 
honour, and — with bleeding heart — even the lives 
of its own for the hope of humanity and civiliza- 
tion. With face buried in his hands he reviewed 
the long catalogue of atrocities on the seas. He 
could feel his cheeks grow hot against his palms. 
Arabic, Lusitania, Persia, Laconia, Falaba, GuU 
fiight, Sussex, California — the names were etched 
in his brain in letters of grief. And now, since 
the "barred-zone" decree . . . 

He straightened in his chair. Like a garment 
the mood of anguish slipped from him. He snap- 
ped on the green desk light and turned to his per- 
sonal typewriter. As he did so, from some old 
student day a phrase flashed into his mind — the 
words of Martin Luther, the Thuringian peasant 
and university professor, who four hundred years 
before had nailed his theses on the church door 
at Wittenberg: 

" Gott helfe mir, ich harm nickt anders." 
They chimed a solemn refrain in his heart as he 
inserted a fresh sheet of paper behind the roller 
and resumed his writing. . . . 

"With a profound sense of the solemn and even 
tragical character of the step I am taking and of the 



SHANDYGAFF 77 

grave responsibilities which it involves. ... 7 
advise that the Congress declare the recent course of 
the Imperial German Government to be in fact noth- 
ing less than war against the Government and people 
of the United States. . . ." 

The typewriter clicked industriously. The face 
bent intently over the keys was grave and quiet, 
but as the paper unrolled before him some of his 
sadness seemed to pass away. A vision of his 
country, no longer divided in petty schisms, 
engrossed in material pursuits, but massed in one 
by the force and fury of a valiant ideal, came into 
his mind. 

"It is for humanity," he whispered to himself. 
" Ich kann nicht anders. . . ." 

" We have no quarrel with the German people. We 
have no feeling toward them but one of sympathy and 
friendship. It was not upon their impulse that their 
government acted in entering this war. It was not 
with their previous knowledge or approval. . . . 
Self-governed nations do not fill their neighbour states 
with spies, or set the course of intrigue to bring about 
some critical posture of affairs which will give them 
an opportunity to strike and make conquest. . . . 
A steadfast concert for peace can never be maintained 
except by a partnership of democratic nations. . . . 



78 SHANDYGAFF 

Only free peoples can hold their purpose and 
their honour steady to a common end and prefer the 
interests of mankind to any narrow interest of their 
ovm" 

With the gathering of the dusk the rain had 
stopped. He rose from his chair and walked to 
the window. The sky had cleared; in the west shone 
a faint band of clear apple green in which burned 
one lucent star. Distantly he could hear the 
murmur of the city like the pulsing heartbeat of 
the nation. As often, in moments of tension, he 
seemed to feel the whole vast stretch of the con- 
tinent throbbing; the yearning breast of the land 
trembling with energy; the great arch of sky, 
spanning from coast to coast, quiver with power 
unused. The murmur of little children in their 
cradles, the tender words of mothers, the footbeat 
of men on the pavements of ten thousand cities, 
the flags leaping in air from high buildings, ships 
putting out to sea with gunners at their sterns — in 
one aching synthesis the vastness and dearness 
and might of his land came to him. A mingled 
nation, indeed, of various and clashing breeds; 
but oh, with what a tradition to uphold ! 

Words were forming in his mind as he watched 
the fading sky, and he returned quietly to the 
typewriter: 



SHANDYGAFF 79 

" We are glad to fight thus for the ultimate peace of 
the world and for the liberation of its peoples, the 
German peoples included. . . . The world must 
be made safe for democracy." 

The world must be made safe for democracy! 
As the wires leaped and the little typewriter spoke 
under the pressure of his strong fingers, scenes 
passed in his mind of the happy, happy Europe 
he had known in old wander days, years before. 

He could see the sun setting down dark aisles 
of the Black Forest; the German peasants at work 
in the fields; the simple, cordial friendliness of that 
lovely land. He remembered French villages 
beside slow-moving rivers; white roads in a hot 
shimmer of sun; apple orchards of the Moselle. 
And England — dear green England, fairest of all 
— the rich blue line of the Chiltern Hills, and 
Buckinghamshire beech woods bronze and yellow 
in the autumn. He remembered thatched cot- 
tages where he had bicycled for tea, and the naive 
rustic folk who had made him welcome. 

What deviltry had taken all these peaceful 
people, gripped them and maddened them, set 
them at one another's throats? Millions of 
children, millions of mothers, millions of humble 
workers, happy in the richness of life — where were 
they now? Life, innocent human life — the most 



80 SHANDYGAFF 

precious thing we know or dream of, freedom to 
work for a living and win our own joys of home 
and love and food — what Black Death had mad- 
dened the world with its damnable seeds of hate? 
Would life ever be free and sweet again? 

The detestable sultry horror of it all broke 
upon him anew in a tide of anguish. No, the 
world could never be the same again in the lives 
of men now living. But for the sake of the gene- 
rations to come — he thought of his own tiny 
grandchildren — for the love of God and the mercy 
of mankind, let this madness be crushed. If his 
country must enter the war let it be only for the 
love and service of humanity. "It is a fearful 
thing," he thought, "but the right is more precious 
than peace." 

Sad at heart he turned again to the typewriter, 
and the keys clicked off the closing words : 

" To such a task we can dedicate our lives and our 
fortunes, everything that we are and everything that 
we have, with the pride of those who know that the 
day has come when America is privileged to spend 
her blood and her might for the principles that gave 
her birth and happiness and the peace which she has 
treasured.'* 

He leaned back in his chair, stiff and weary. 
His head ached hotly. With elbows on the desk 



SHANDYOAFF 81 

he covered his forehead and eyes with his hands. 
All the agony, the bitterness, the burden of pre- 
ceding days swept over him, but behind it was a 
cool and cleansing current of peace. "Ich kann 
nicht anders," he whispered. 

Then, turning swiftly to the machine, he typed 
rapidly: 

" God helping her, she can do no other.** 



THE HEAD OF THE FIRM 

HE ALWAYS lost his temper when the for- 
eign mail came in. Sitting in his private 
room, which overlooked a space of gardens 
where bright red and yellow flowers were planted 
in rhomboids, triangles, parallelograms, and other 
stiff and ugly figures, he would glance hastily 
through the papers and magazines. He was fa- 
miliar with several foreign languages, and would 
skim through the text. Then he would pound the 
table with his fist, walk angrily about the floor, 
and tear the offensive journals into strips. For 
very often he found in these papers from abroad 
articles or cartoons that^were most annoying to him, 
and very detrimental to the business of his firm. 

His assistants tried to keep foreign publications 
away from him, but he was plucky in his own harsh 
way. He insisted on seeing them. Always the 
same thing happened. His face would grow grim, 
the seam-worn forehead would corrugate, the 
muscles of his jaw throb nervously. His gray 
eyes would flash — and the fist come down heavily 
on the mahogany desk. 

When a man is nearly sixty and of a full-blooded 

82 



SHANDYGAFF 83 

physique, it is not well for him to have these fre- 
quent pulsations of rage. But he had always 
found it hard to control his temper. He some- 
times remembered what a schoolmaster had said 
to him at Cassel, forty-five years before: "He 
who loses his temper will lose everything." 

But he must be granted great provocation. 
He had always had difficulties to contend with. 
His father was an invalid, and he himself was puny 
in childhood; infantile paralysis withered his left 
arm when he was an infant; but in spite of these 
handicaps he had made himself a vigorous swim- 
mer, rider, and yachtsman; he could shoot better 
with one arm than most sportsmen with two. 
After leaving the university he served in the 
army, but at his father's death the management 
of the vast family business came into his hands. 
He was then twenty-eight. 

No one can question the energy with which he 
set himself to carry on the affairs of the firm. 
Generous, impetuous, indiscreet, stubborn, pug- 
nacious, his blend of qualities held many of the 
elements of a successful man of business. His first 
act was to dismiss the confidential and honoured 
assistant who had guided both his father and 
grandfather in the difficult years of the firm's 
growth. But the new executive was determined 
to run the business his own way. Disregarding 



84 SHANDYGAFF 

criticism, ridicule, or flattery, he declared it his 
mission to spread the influence of the business 
to the ends of the earth. "We must have our 
place in the sun," he said; and announced himself 
as the divine instrument through whom this would 
be accomplished. He made it perfectly plain 
that no man's opposition would balk him in the 
management of the firm's affairs. One of his 
most famous remarks was: "Considering myself 
as the instrument of the Lord, without heeding 
the views and opinions of the day, I go my way." 
The board of directors censured him for this, but 
he paid little heed. 

The growth of the business was enormous; 
nothing like it had been seen in the world's history. 
Branch offices were opened all over the globe. 
Vessels bearing the insignia of the company were 
seen on every ocean. He himself with his accus- 
tomed energy travelled everywhere to advance 
the interests of trade. In England, Russia, 
Denmark, Italy, Austria, Turkey, the Holy 
Land, he made personal visits to the firm's best 
customers. He sent his brother to America to 
spread the goodwill of the business; and other 
members of the firm to France, Holland, China, 
and Japan. Telegram after telegram kept the 
world's cables busy as he distributed congratula- 
tions, condolences, messages of one kind and an- 



SHANDYGAFF 85 

other to foreign merchants. His publicity depart- 
ment never rested. He employed famous scien- 
tists and inventors to improve the products of his 
factories. He reared six sons to carry on the 
business after him. 

This is no place to record minutely the million 
activities of thirty years that made his business 
one of the greatest on earth. It is all written 
down in history. Suffice it to say that those years 
did not go by without sorrows. He was afflicted 
with an incurable disease. His temperament, 
like high tension steel, was of a brittle quality; 
it had the tendency to snap under great strains. 
Living always at fever pitch, sparing himself no 
fatigue of body or soul, the whirring dynamo of 
energy in him often showed signs of overstress. 

It is hard to conceive what he must have gone 
through in those last months. You must remem- 
ber the extraordinary conditions in his line of 
business caused by the events of recent years. 
He had lived to see his old friends, merchants 
with whom he had dealt for decades, some of them 
the foreign representatives of his own firm, out 
of a job and hunted from their homes by creditors. 
He had lived to realize that the commodity he 
and his family had been manufacturing for gen- 
erations was out of date, a thing no longer needed 
or wanted by the modern world. The strain which 



86 SHANDYGAFF 

his mind was enduring is shown by the febrile 
and unbalanced tone of one of his letters, sent 
to a member of his own family who ran one of the 
company's branch offices but was forced to resign 
by bankruptcy: 

"I have heard with wrath of the infamous 
outrage committed by our common enemies upon 
you and upon your business. I assure you that 
your deprivation can be only temporary. The 
mailed fist, with further aid from Almighty God, 
will restore you to your office, of which no man by 
right can rob you. The company will wreak 
vengeance on those who have dared so insolently 
to lay their criminal hands on you. We hope to 
welcome you at the earliest opportunity." 

The failure of his business was the great drama 
of the century; and it is worth while to remember 
what it was that killed it — and him. While the 
struggle was still on there were many arguments 
as to what would bring matters to an end; some 
cunning invention, some new patent that would 
outwit the methods of his firm. But after all it 
was nothing more startling than the printing press 
and the moral of the whole matter may be put in 
those fine old words, "But above all things, truth 
beareth away the victory." Little by little, the 
immense power of the printed word became too 
strong for him. Rave and fume as he might, and 



SHANDYGAFF 87 

hammer the mahogany desk, the rolling thunders 
of a world massed against him cracked even his 
stiff will. Little by little the plain truth sifted into 
the minds and hearts of the thousands working 
in his huge organization. In Russia, in Greece, 
in Spain, in Austria, in China, in Mexico, he saw 
men bursting the shells of age and custom that 
had cramped them. One by one his competitors 
adopted the new ideas, or had them forced upon 
them; profit-sharing, workmen's insurance, the 
right of free communities to live their own lives. 

Deep in his heart he must have known he was 
doomed to fail, but that perverse demon of 
strong-headed pugnacity was trenched deep within 
him. He was always a fighter, but his face, 
though angry, obstinate, proud, was still not 
an evil face. He broke down while there was 
still some of the business to save and some of the 
goodwill intact. 

It was the printing press that decided it: the 
greatest engine in the world, to which submarines 
and howitzers and airplanes are but wasteful toys. 
For when the printing presses are united the 
planet may buck and yaw, but she comes into line 
at last. A million inky cylinders, roaring in chorus, 
were telling him the truth. When his assistants 
found him, on his desk lay a half -ripped magazine 
where he had tried to tear up a mocking cartoon. 



88 SHANDYGAFF 

I think that as he sat at his table in those last 
days, staring with embittered eyes at the savage 
words and pictures that came to him from over 
the seven seas, he must have had some vision of 
the shadowy might of the press, of the vast irresis- 
tible urge of public opinion, that hung like dark 
wings above his head. For little by little the 
printed word incarnates itself in power, and in 
ways undreamed of makes itself felt. Little by 
little the wills of common men, coalescing, running 
together like beads of mercury on a plate, quiver- 
ing into rhythm and concord, become a mighty 
force that may be ever so impalpable, but grinds 
empires to powder. Mankind suffers hideous 
wrongs and cruel setbacks, but when once the 
collective purpose of humanity is summoned to a 
righteous end, it moves onward like the tide up a 
harbour. 

The struggle was long and bitter. His superb 
organization, with such colossal resources for 
human good, lavished in the fight every energy 
known to man. For a time it seemed as though 
he would pull through. His managers had fore- 
seen every phase of this unprecedented com- 
petition, and his warehouses were stocked. But 
slowly the forces of his opponents began to focus 
themselves. 

Then even his own employees suspected the 



SHANDYGAFF 89 

truth. His agents, solicitors, and salesmen, scat- 
tered all over the globe, realized that one com- 
pany cannot twist the destiny of mankind. He 
felt the huge fabric of his power quiver and creak. 
The business is now in the hands of the execu- 
tors, pending a reorganization. 



17 HERIOT ROW 

THERE is a small black notebook into which 
I look once or twice a year to refresh my 
memory of a carnal and spiritual pil- 
grimage to Edinburgh, made with Mifflin McGill 
(upon whose head be peace) in the summer of 
1911. It is a testament of light-hearted youth, 
savoury with the unindentured joys of twenty-one 
and the grand literary passion. Would that one 
might again steer Shotover (dearest of pushbikes) 
along the Banbury Road, and see Mifflin's lean 
shanks twirl up the dust on the way to Stratford! 
Never was more innocent merriment spread upon 
English landscape. When I die, bury the black 
notebook with me. 

That notebook is memorable also in a statis- 
tical way, and perchance may serve future his- 
torians as a document proving the moderate cost 
of wayfaring in those halcyon days. Nothing in 
Mr. Pepys' diary is more interesting than his me- 
ticulous record of what his amusements cost him. 
Mayhap some future economist will pore upon 
these guileless confessions. For in the black 
memorandum book I succeeded, for almost the 

90 



SHANDYGAFF 



91 



only time in my life, in keeping an accurate record 
of the lapse of coin during nine whole days. I 
shall deposit the document with the Congressional 
Library in Washington for future annalists; in the 
meantime I make no excuse for recounting the 
items of the first sixty hours. Let no one take 
amiss the frequent entries marked "cider." 
July, 1911, was a hot month and a dusty, and we 
were biking fifty miles the day. Please reckon 
exchange at two cents per penny. 



July 16 pint cider .... 
^ pint cider 
lunch at Banbury 
pint cider at Ettington 
supper at Stratford . 
stamp and postcard . 



£ s. d 
4 

1* 

2 2 

3 

1 3 

2 



4 3£ 

July 17 Postcards and stamps ... 9 

pencil 1 

Warwick Castle 2 - 

cider at the Bear and Baculus 

(which Mifflin would call the 

Bear and Bacillus) .... -2^ 
Bowling Green Inn, bed and 

breakfast 3 2 

Puncture 1 — 

Lunch, Kenilworth .... 16 

Kenilworth Castle .... 6 



02 SHANDYGAFF 

Postcards . . . . , . 
Lemonade, Coventry 

Cider 

Supper, Tamworth, The Castle 
Hotel 



July 18 Johnson house, Lichfield 
cider at The Three Crowns 
postcard and shave . 
The King's Head, bed and 

breakfast .... 

cider 

tip on road* .... 

lunch, Uttoxeter 

cider, Ashbourne, The Green 

Man 

landlord's drink, Ashbourne 
supper, Newhaven House, 
lemonade, Buxton 



4 

4 

2* 



2 1 



16 5\ 


8 

4 
4 


8 7 

2 

1» 

1 8 


3 

1 

1 - 

3 



Total 



£1-4-1 

($5.78) 



That is to say, 24 bob for two and a half days. 
We used to reckon that ten shillings a day would 
do us very nicely, barring luxuries and emergen- 



*As far as I can remember, this was a gratuity to a rather tarnished subject who 
directed us at a fork in the road, near a railway crossing. 

tThis was a copper well lavished; for the publican, a ventripotent person with a 
liquid and glamorous brown eye, told us excellent gossip about Dr. Johnson and 
George Eliot, both heroes in that neighbourhood. "Yes," we said, "that man Eliot 
was a great writer," and he agreed. 



SHANDYGAFF 93 

cies. We attained a zealous proficiency in reck- 
oning shillings and pence, and our fervour in 
posting our ledgers would have gladdened a firm 
of auditors. I remember lying on the coping of 
a stone bridge over the water of Teviot near 
Hawick, admiring the green-brown tint of the 
swift stream bickering over the stones. Mifflin 
was writing busily in his notebook on the other 
side of the bridge. I thought to myself, "Bless 
the lad, he's jotting down some picturesque notes 
of something that has struck his romantic eye." 
And just then he spoke — "Four and eleven pence 
half -penny so far to-day!" 

Would I could retrogress over the devious and 
enchanting itinerary. The McGill route from 
Oxford to Auld Reekie is 417 miles; it was the 
afternoon of the ninth day when with thumping 
hearts we saw Arthur's Seat from a dozen miles 
away. Our goal was in sight! 

There was a reason for all this pedalling mad- 
ness. Ever since the days when we had wan- 
dered by Darby Creek, reading R. L. S. aloud to 
one another, we had planned this trip to the gray 
metropolis of the north. A score of sacred names 
had beckoned us, the haunts of the master. We 
knew them better than any other syllables in the 
world. Heriot Row, Princes Street, the Calton 
Hill, Duddingston Loch, Antigua Street, the 



94 SHANDYGAFF 

Water of Leith, Colinton, Swanston, the Pentland 
Hills — O my friends, do those names mean to 
you what they did to us? Then you are one of 
the brotherhood — what was to us then the sweetest 
brotherhood in the world! 

In a quiet little hotel in Rutland Square we 
found decent lodging, in a large chamber which 
was really the smoking room of the house. The 
city was crowded with tourists on account of an 
expected visit of the King and Queen; every other 
room in the hotel was occupied. Greatly to our 
satisfaction we were known as "the smoking- 
room gentlemen" throughout our stay. Our 
windows opened upon ranks of corridor-cars 
lying on the Caledonian Railway sidings, and the 
clink and jar of buffers and coupling irons were 
heard all night long. I seem to remember that 
somewhere in his letters R. L. S. speaks of that 
same sound. He knew Rutland Square well, for 
his boyhood friend Charles Baxter lived there. 
Writing from Samoa in later years he says that 
one memory stands out above all others of his 
youth — Rutland Square. And while that was of 
course only the imaginative fervour of the mo- 
ment, yet we were glad to know that in that quiet 
little cul de sac behind the railway terminal we 
were on ground well loved by Tusitala. 

The first evening, and almost every twilight 



SHANDYGAFF 95 

while we were in Auld Reekie, we found our way 
to 17 Heriot Row — famous address, which had 
long been as familiar to us as our own. I think 
we expected to find a tablet on the house com- 
memorating the beloved occupant; but no; to our 
surprise it was dark, dusty, and tenantless. A 
sign to sell was prominent. To take the name 
of the agent was easy. A great thought struck 
us. Could we not go over the house in the char- 
acter of prospective purchasers? Mifflin and I 
went back to our smoking room and concocted a 
genteel letter to Messrs. Guild and Shepherd, 
Writers to the Signet. 

Promptly came a reply (Scots business men 
answer at once). 

16 Charlotte Square 
Edinburgh 
26th July, 19X1 
Dear Sir, 

17 HERIOT ROW 

We have received your letter regarding this house. The 

house can be seen at any time, and if you will let us know 

when you wish to view it we shall arrange to have it opened. 

We are, 

Yours faithfully, 

Guild and Shepherd. 

Our hearts were uplifted, but now we were 
mightily embarrassed as to the figure we would cut 



96 SHANDYGAFF 

before the Writers to the Signet. You must 
remember that we were two young vagabonds 
in the earliest twenties, travelling with slim knap- 
sacks, and much soiled by a fortnight on the road. 
I was in knickerbockers and khaki shirt; Mifflin 
in greasy gray flannels and subfusc Norfolk. 
Our only claims to gentility were our monocles. 
Always take a monocle on a vagabond tour: it is 
a never-failing source of amusement and passport 
of gentility. No matter how ragged you are, if 
you can screw a pane in your eye you can awe the 
yokel or the tradesman. 

The private records of the firm of Guild and 
Shepherd doubtless show that on Friday, July 
28, 1911, one of their polite young attaches, 
appearing as per appointment at 17 Heriot Row, 
was met by two eccentric young gentlemen, clad 
in dirty white flannel hats, waterproof capes, each 
with an impressive monocle. Let it be said to 
the honour of the attache in question that he 
showed no symptoms of surprise or alarm. We 
explained, I think, that we were scouting for my 
father, who (it was alleged) greatly desired to 
settle down in Edinburgh. And we had pres- 
ence of mind enough to enquire about plumbing, 
stationary wash-tubs, and the condition of the 
flues. I wish I could remember what rent was 
quoted. 



SHANDYGAFF 97 

He showed us all through the house; and you 
may imagine that we stepped softly and with beat- 
ing hearts. Here we were on the very track of 
the Magician himself: his spirit whispered in the 
lonely rooms. We imagined R. L. S. as a little 
child, peering from the windows at dusk to see 
Leerie light the street-lamps outside — a quaint, 
thin, elvish face with shining brown eyes; or held 
up in illness by Cummie to see the gracious dawn 
heralded by oblongs of light in the windows across 
the Queen Street gardens. We saw the college 
lad, tall, with tweed coat and cigarette, returning 
to Heriot Row with an armful of books, in sad or 
sparkling mood. The house was dim and dusty: 
a fine entrance hall, large dining room facing the 
street — and we imagined Louis and his parents 
at breakfast. Above this, the drawing room, 
floored with parquet oak, a spacious and attrac- 
tive chamber. Above this again, the nursery, and 
opening off it the little room where faithful Cum- 
mie slept. But in vain we looked for some sign 
or souvenir of the entrancing spirit. The room 
that echoed to his childish glee, that heard his 
smothered sobs in the endless nights of childish 
pain, the room where he scribbled and brooded 
and burst into gusts of youth's passionate outcry, 
is now silent and forlorn. 

With what subtly mingled feelings we peered 



98 SHANDYGAFF 

from room to room, seeing everything, and yet 
not daring to give ourselves away to the courteous 
young agent. And what was it he said? — "This 
was the house of Lord So-and-so" (I forget the 
name) — "and incidentally, Robert Louis Steven- 
son lived here once. His signature occurs once or 
twice in the deeds." 

Incidentally! . . . 

Like many houses in Auld Reekie, 17 Heriot 
Row is built on a steep slant of ground, so that the 
rear of the house is a storey or more higher than 
the face. We explored the kitchens, laundries, 
store-rooms, and other "offices" with care, imagin- 
ing that little "Smoutie" may have run here and 
there in search of tid-bits from the cook. Visions 
of that childhood, fifty years before, were almost 
as real as our own. We seemed to hear the 
young treble of his voice. That house was the 
home of the Stevensons for thirty years (1857- 
1887) — surely even the thirty years that have 
gone by since Thomas Stevenson died cannot have 
laid all those dear ghosts we conjured up ! 

We thanked our guide and took leave of him. 
If the firm of Guild and Shepherd should ever see 
this, surely they will forgive our innocent decep- 
tion, for the honour of R. L. S. I wonder if any 
one has yet put a tablet on the house? If not, 
Mifflin and I will do so, some day. 



SHANDYGAFF 99 

In the evenings we used to wander up to Heriot 
Row in the long Northern dusk, to sit on the front 
steps of number 17 waiting for Leerie to come and 
light the famous lamp which still stands on the 
pavement in front of the dining-room windows: 

For we are very lucky, with a lamp before the door, 
And Leerie stops to light it as he lights so many more; 
And O! before you hurry by with ladder and with light, 
O Leerie, see a little child and nod to him to-night! 

But no longer does Leerie "with lantern and 
with ladder come posting up the street." Now- 
adays he carries a long pole bearing a flame cun- 
ningly sheltered in a brass socket. But the 
Leerie of 1911 ("Leerie-light-the-lamps" is a 
generic nickname for all lamplighters in Scotland) 
was a pleasant fellow even if ladderless, and we 
used to have a cigar ready for him when he 
reached 17. We told him of R. L. S., of whom 
he had vaguely heard, and explained the sanctity 
of that particular lamp. He in turn talked freely 
of his craft, and learning that we were Americans 
he told us of his two sisters "in Pennsylvania, at 
21 Thorn Street." He seemed to think Penn- 
sylvania a town, but finally we learned that the 
Misses Leerie lived in Sewickley where they were 
doing well, and sending back money to the "kid- 
dies. " Good Leerie, I wonder do you still light the 



100 SHANDYGAFF 

lamps on Heriot Row, or have you too seen redder 
beacons on Flanders fields? 

One evening I remember we fell into discussion 
whether the lamp-post was still the same one that 
R. L. S. had known. We were down on hands and 
knees on the pavement, examining the base of the 
pillar by match-light in search of possible dates. 
A very seedy and disreputable looking man 
passed, evidently regarding us with apprehension 
as detectives. Mifflin, never at a loss, remarked 
loudly "No, I see no footprints here," and as the 
ragged one passed hastily on with head twisted 
over his shoulder, we followed him. At the corner 
of Howe Street he broke into an uneasy shuffle, 
and Mifflin turned a great laugh into a Scotland 
Yard sneeze. 

Howe Street crosses Heriot Row at right angles, 
only a few paces |from No. 17. It dips sharply 
downhill toward the Water of Leith, and Mifflin 
and I used to stand at the corner and wonder 
just where took place the adventure with the lame 
boy which R. L. S. once described when setting 
down some recollections of childhood* 

In Howe street, round the corner from our house, I often 
saw a lame boy of rather a rough and poor appearance. He 
had one leg much shorter than the other, and wallowed in his 
walk, in consequence, like a ship in a seaway. I had read 
more than enough, in tracts and goody story books, of the 



SHANDYGAFF 101 

isolation of the infirm; and after many days of bashfulness 
and hours of consideration, I finally accosted him, sheepishly 
enough I daresay, in these words: "Would you like to 
play with me?" I remember the expression, which 
sounds exactly like a speech from one of the goody books 
that had nerved me to the venture. But the answer 
was not he one I had anticipated, for it was a blast of oaths. 
I need not say how fast I fled. This incident was the more 
to my credit as I had, when I was young, a desperate 
aversion to addressing strangers, though when once we had 
got into talk I was pretty certain to assume the lead. The 
last particular may still be recognized. About four years 
ago I saw my lame lad, and knew him again at once. He 
was then a man of great strength, rolling along, with an inch 
of cutty in his mouth and a butcher's basket on his arm. 
Our meeting had been nothing to him, but it was a great 
affair to me. 

We strolled up the esplanade below the Castle, 
pausing in Ramsay's Gardens to admire the 
lighted city from above. In the valley between 
the Castle and Princes Street the pale blue mist 
rises at night like an exhalation from the old gray 
stones. The lamps shining through it blend in 
a delicate opalescent sheen, shot here and there 
with brighter flares. As the sky darkens the 
castle looms in silhouette, with one yellow square 
below the Half Moon Battery. "There are no 
stars like the Edinburgh street lamps," says R. 
L. S. Aye, and the brightest of them all shines 
on Heriot Row. 



102 



SHANDYGAFF 



The vision of that child face still comes to me, 
peering down from the dining-room window. R. 
L. S. may never have gratified his boyish wish to 
go round with Leerie and light the lamps, but he 
lit many and more enduring flames even in the 
hearts of those who never saw him. 



FRANK CONFESSIONS OF A PUBLISHER'S 
READER 

[Denis Dulcet, brother of the well-known poet 
Dunraven Dulcet and the extremely well-known 
literary agent Dove Dulcet, was for many years the 
head reader for a large publishing house. It was 
my good fortune to know him intimately, and when 
he could be severed from his innumerable manu- 
scripts, which accompanied him everywhere, even in 
bed, he was very good company. His premature 
death from reader's cramp and mental hernia was 
a sad loss to the world of polite letters. Thousands 
of mediocre books would have been loaded upon the 
public but for his incisive and unerring judgment. 
When he lay on his deathbed, surrounded by half- 
read MSS., he sent for me, and with an air of extreme 
solemnity laid a packet in my hand. It contained 
the following confession, and it was his last wish that 
it should be published without alteration. I include 
it here in memory of my very dear friend. \ 



r 



MY youth I was wont to forecast various 
occupations for myself. Engine driver, tug- 
boat captain, actor, statesman, and wild 

103 



104 SHANDYGAFF 

animal trainer — such were the visions with which 
I put myself to sleep. Never did the merry life 
of a manuscript reader swim into my ken. But 
here I am, buried elbow deep in the literary output 
of a commercial democracy. My only excuse for 
setting down these paragraphs is the hope that 
other more worthy members of the ancient and 
honorable craft may be induced to speak out in 
meeting. In these days when every type of man 
is interviewed, his modes of thinking conned 
and commented upon, why not a symposium of 
manuscript readers? Also I realized the other 
day, while reading a manuscript by Harold Bell 
Wright, that my powers are failing. My old 
trouble is gaining on me, and I may not be long 
for this world. Before I go to face the greatest 
of all Rejection Slips, I want to utter my message 
without fear or favour. 

As a class, publishers' readers are not vocal. 
They spend their days and nights assiduously (in 
the literal sense) bent over mediocre stuff, poking 
and poring in the unending hope of finding some- 
thing rich and strange. A gradual stultitia seizes 
them. They take to drink; they beat their wives; 
they despair of literature. Worst, and most 
preposterous, they one and all nourish secret 
hopes of successful authorship. You might think 
that the interminable flow of turgid blockish 



SHANDYGAFF 105 

fiction that passes beneath their weary eyes would 
justly sicken them of the abominable gymnastic 
of writing. But no: the venom is in the blood. 

Great men have graced the job — and got out of it 
as soon as possible. George Meredith was a reader 
once; so was Frank Norris; also E. V. Lucas and Gil- 
bert Chesterton. One of the latter's comments on a 
manuscript is still preserved. Writing of a novel 
by a lady who was the author of many unpublished 
stories, all marked by perseverance rather than 
talent, he said, "Age cannot wither nor custom 
stale her infinite lack of variety." But alas, we 
hear too little of these gentlemen in their capac- 
ity as publishers' pursuivants. ♦ Patrolling the 
porches of literature, why did they not bequeath 
us some pandect of their experience, some rich 
garniture of commentary on the adventures that 
befell? But they, and younger men such as 
Coningsby Dawson and Sinclair Lewis, have gone 
on into the sunny hayfields of popular authorship 
and said nothing. 

But these brilliant swallow-tailed migrants are 
not typical. Your true specimen of manuscript 
reader is the faithful old percheron who is content 
to go on, year after year, sorting over the literary 
pemmican that comes before him, inexhaustible in 
his love for the delicacies of good writing, happy 
if once or twice a twelve-month he chance upon 



106 SHANDYGAFF 

some winged thing. He is not the pettifogging 
pilgarlic of popular conception: he is a devoted 
servant of letters, willing to take his thirty or 
forty dollars a week, willing to suffer the peine 
forte et dure of his profession in the knowledge of 
honest duty done, writing terse and marrowy 
little essays on manuscripts, which are buried in 
the publishers' files. This man is an honour to 
the profession, and I believe there are many such. 
Certainly there are many who sigh wistfully when 
they must lay aside some cherished writing of their 
own to devote an evening to illiterate twaddle. 
Five book manuscripts a day, thirty a week, 
close to fifteen hundred a year — that is a fair 
showing for the head reader of a large publishing 
house. 

One can hardly blame him if he sometimes grow 
skeptic or acid about the profession of letters. 
Of each hundred manuscripts turned in there 
will rarely be more than three or four that merit 
any serious consideration; only about one in a 
hundred will be acceptable for publication. And 
the others — alas that human beings should have 
invented ink to steal away their brains! "Only 
a Lady Barber" is the title of a novel in manu- 
script which I read the other day. Written in the 
most atrocious dialect, it betrayed an ignorance 
of composition that would have been discreditable 



SHANDYGAFF 107 

to a polyp. It described the experiences of a 
female tonsor somewhere in Idaho, and closed 
with her Machiavellian manoeuvres to entice 
into her shaving chair a man who had bilked her, 
so that she might slice his ear. No need to harrow 
you with more of the same kind. I read almost 
a score every week. Often I think of a poem 
which was submitted to me once, containing this 
immortal couplet: 

She damped a pen in the ooze of her brain and wrote a verse 

on the air, 
A verse that had shone on the disc of the sun, had she chosen 

to set it there. 

Let me beg you, my dears, leave the pen un- 
damped unless your cerebral ooze really has some- 
thing to impart. And then, once a year or so, 
when one is thinking that the hooves of Pegasus 
have turned into pigs' trotters, comes some 
Joseph Conrad, some Walter de la Mare, some 
Rupert Brooke or Pearsall Smith, to restore one's 
sanity. 

Or else — what is indeed more frequent — the 
reader's fainting spirits are repaired not by the 
excellence of the manuscript before him, but by 
its absolute literary nonentity, a kind of intellec- 
tual Absolute Zero. Lack of merit may be so 
complete, so grotesque, that the composition 



108 SHANDYGAFF 

affords to the sophistic eye a high order of comedy. 
A lady submits a poem in many cantos, beginning 

Our heart is but a bundle of muscle 

In which our passions tumble and tussle. 

Another lady begins her novel with the following 
psychanalysis : 

"Thus doth the ever-changing course of things run a per- 
petual circle." . . . She read the phrase and then 
reflected, the cause being a continued prognostication, begin- 
ning and ending as it had done tbe day before, to-morrow 
and forever, maybe, of her own ailment, a paradoxical mal- 
ady, being nothing more nor less than a pronounced case of 
malnutrition of the soul, a broken heart-cord, aggravated by a 
total collapse of that portion of the mentalities which had 
been bolstered up by undue pride, fallacious arguments* 
modern foibles and follies peculiar to the human species, 
both male and female, under favorable social conditions, 
found in provincial towns as well as in large cities and fash- 
ionable watering places. 

But as a fitting anodyne to this regrettable case 
of soul malnutrition, let me append a description 
of a robuster female, taken verbatim from a man- 
uscript (penned by masculine hand) which be- 
came a by-word in one publisher's office. 

She was a beautiful young lady. She was,. a medium- 
sized, elegant figure, wearing a neatly-fitted travelling dress of 
black alpaca. Her raven-black hair, copious both in length 



SHANDYGAFF 109 

and volume and figured like a deep river, rippled by the wind, 
was parted in the centre and combed smoothly down, 
ornamenting her pink temples with a flowing tracery that 
passed round to its modillion windings on a graceful crown. 
Her mouth was set with pearls adorned with elastic rubies and 
tuned with minstrel lays, while her nose gracefully concealed 
its own umbrage, and her eyes imparted a radiant glow to the 
azure of the sky. Jewels of plain gold were about her ears 
and her tapering strawberry hands, and a golden chain, 
attached to a time-keeper of the same material, sparkled on 
an elegantly-rounded bosom that was destined to be pushed 
forward by sighs; 

Let it not be thought that only the gracious 
sex can inspire such plenitude of meticulous 
portraiture! Here is a description of the hero in 
a novel by a man which appeared on my desk 
recently: 

For some time past there had been appearing at the home 
of Sarah Ellenton, a man not over fifty years of age, well 
groomed and of the appearances of being on good terms 
with prosperity in many phases. His complexion was red- 
dish. His hazel eyes deepset and close together were small 
and shifting. His nose ran down to a point in many lines, 
and from the point back to where it joined above his lip, 
the course was seen to swerve slightly to one side. His 
upper lip assumed almost any form and at all times. His 
mouth ran across his face in a thin line, curved by waves 
according to the smiles and expressions he employed. Below 
those features was a chin of fine proportions, showing nothing 
to require study, but in his jaw hinges there was a device 



110 SHANDYGAFF 

that worked splendidly, when he wished to show unction 
and charity, by sending out his chin on such occasions in 
the kindest advances one would wish to see. 

It was not long before Sarah became Mrs. John R. Quinley. 

I hear that the authors are going to unionize 
themselves and join the A. F. of L. The word 
"author" carries no sanctity with me: I have 
read too many of them. If their forming a trade 
union will better the output of American literature 
I am keen for it. I know that the professional 
reader has a jaundiced eye; insensibly he acquires 
a parallax which distorts his vision. Reading in- 
cessantly, now fiction, now history, poetry, essays, 
philosophy, science, exegetics, and what not, he 
becomes a kind of pantechnicon of slovenly know- 
ledge; a knower of thousands of things that aren't 
so. Every crank's whim, every cretin's philoso- 
phy, is fired at him first of all. Every six months 
comes in the inevitable treatise on the fourth 
dimension or on making gold from sea- water, or on 
using moonlight to run dynamos, or on Pope 
Joan or Prester John. And with it all he must 
retain his simple-hearted faith in the great art of 
writing and in the beneficence of Gutenberg. 

Manuscript readers need a trade union far 
worse than authors. There is all too little clan- 
nishness among us. We who are the helpless tar- 
get for the slings and arrows of every writer who 



SHANDYGAFF 111 

chooses to put pen on foolscap — might we not meet 
now and then for the humour of exchanging anec- 
dotes? No class of beings is more in need of the 
consolations of intercourse. Perpend, brothers! 
Let us order a tierce of malmsey and talk it over! 
Perchance, too, a trade union among readers might 
be of substantial advantage. Is it not sad that a 
man should read manuscripts all the sweet years 
of his maturity, and be paid forty dollars a week? 
Let us make sixty the minimum — or let there 
be a pogrom among the authors! 



WILLIAM McFEE 

M'Phee is the most tidy of chief engineers. If the leg 
of a cockroach gets into one of his slide-valves the whole 
ship knows it, and half the ship has to clean up the mess. 

RlJDYARD KjFIJNG. 

THE next time the Cunard Company com- 
missions a new liner I wish they would 
sign on Joseph Conrad as captain, Rud- 
yard Kipling as purser, and William McFee as 
chief engineer. They might add Don Marquis 
as deck steward and Hall Came as chief -stewardess. 
Then I would like to be at Raymond and Whit- 
comb's and watch the clerks booking pas- 
sages ! 

William McFee does not spell his name quite 
as does the Scotch engineer in Mr. Kipling's 
Brugglesmith, but I feel sure that his attitude 
toward cockroaches in the slide-valve is the 
same. Unhappily I do not know Mr. McFee 
in his capacity as engineer; but I know and 
respect his feelings as a writer, his love of honour- 
able and honest work, his disdain for blurb and 
blat. And by an author's attitude toward the 
purveyors of publicity, you may know him . 
112 



SHANDYGAFF 113 

One evening about the beginning of December, 
1915, 1 was sitting by the open fire in Hempstead, 
Long Island, a comparatively inoffensive young 
man, reading the new edition of Flecker's "The 
Golden Journey to Samarkand" issued that 
October by Martin Seeker in London. Mr. 
Seeker, like many other wise publishers, inserts 
in the back of his books the titles of other volumes 
issued by him. Little did I think, as I turned to 
look over Mr. Seeker's announcements, that a train 
of events was about to begin which would render 
me, during the succeeding twelve months, a 
monomaniac in the eyes of my associates; so 
much so that when I was blessed with a son and 
heir just a year later I received a telegram signed 
by a dozen of them: "Congratulations. Name 
him Casuals!" 

It was in that list of Mr. Seeker's titles for the 
winter of 1915-16 that my eyes first rested, with a 
premonitory lust, upon the not-to-be-forgotten 
words. 

MCFEE, WILLIAM: CASUALS OF THE SEA. 

Who could fail to be stirred by so brave a title? 
At once I wrote for a copy. 

My pocket memorandum book for Sunday, 
January 9, 1916, contains this note: 

"Finished reading Casuals of the Sea, a good 
book. H still laid up with bad ankle. In the 



114 SHANDYGAFF 

p. m. we sat and read Bible aloud to Celia before 
the open fire." 

My first impressions of "Casuals of the Sea, 
a good book" are interwoven with memories of 
Celia, a pious Polish serving maid from Pike 
County, Pennsylvania, who could only be kept 
in the house by nightly readings of another Good 
Book. She was horribly homesick (that was her 
first voyage away from home) and in spite of 
persistent Bible readings she fled after two weeks, 
back to her home in Parker's Glen, Pa. She was 
our first servant, and we had prepared a beautiful 
room in the attic for her. However, that has 
nothing to do with Mr. McFee. 

Casuals of the Sea is a novel whose sale of ten 
thousand copies in America is more important as a 
forecast of literary weather than many a popular 
distribution of a quarter million. Be it known 
by these presents that there are at least ten thou- 
sand librivora in this country who regard literature 
not merely as an emulsion. This remarkable 
novel, the seven years' study of a busy engineer 
occupied with boiler inspections, indicator cards 
and other responsibilities of the Lord of Below, 
was the first really public appearance of a pen 
that will henceforth be listened to with respect. 

Mr. McFee had written two books before " Cas- 
uals" was published, but at that time it was not 



SHANDYGAFF 115 

easy to find any one who had read them. They 
were Letters from an Ocean Tramp (1908) and 
Aliens (1914); the latter has been rewritten since 
then and issued in a revised edition. It is a very 
singular experiment in the art of narrative, and a 
rich commentary on human folly by a man who 
has made it his hobby to think things out for 
himself. And the new version is headlighted by 
a preface which may well take its place among 
the most interesting literary confessions of this 
generation, where Mr. McFee shows himself as 
that happiest of men, the artist who also has other 
and more urgent concerns than the whittling of a 
paragraph: — 

Of art I never grow weary, but she calls me over the world. 
I suspect the sedentary art worker. Most of all I suspect 
the sedentary writer. I divide authors into two classes — 
genuine artists, and educated men who wish to earn enough 
to let them live like country gentlemen. With the latter I 
have no concern. But the artist knows when his time has 
come. In the same way I turned with irresistible longing 
to the sea, whereon I had been wont to earn my living. It 
is a good life and I love it. I love the men and their ships. 
I find in them a never-ending panorama which illustrates 
my theme, the problem of human folly. 

Mr. McFee, you see, has some excuse for being 
a good writer because he has never had to write 
for a living. He has been writing for the fun of it 



116 SHANDYGAFF 

ever since he was an apprentice in a big engineering 
shop in London twenty years ago. His profession 
deals with exacting and beautiful machinery, and 
he could no more do hack writing than hack 
engineering. And unlike the other English real- 
ists of his generation who have cultivated a cheap 
flippancy, McFee finds no exhilaration in easy 
sneers at middle-class morality. He has a dirk 
up his sleeve for Gentility (how delightfully he 
flays it in Aliens) but he loves the middle classes 
for just what they are: the great fly-wheel of the 
world. His attitude toward his creations is that 
of a "benevolent marbleheart" (his own phrase). 
He has seen some of the seams of life, and like 
McAndrew he has hammered his own philosophy. 
It is a manly, just, and gentle creed, but not a soft 
one. Since the war began he has been on sea ser- 
vice, first on a beef-ship and transport in the 
Mediterranean, now as sub-lieutenant in the 
British Navy. When the war is over, and if he 
feels the call of the desk, Mr. McFee's brawny 
shoulder will sit in at the literary feast and a big 
handful of scribblers will have to drop down the 
dumb-waiter shaft to make room for him. It is a 
disconcerting figure in Grub Street, the man who 
really has something to say. 

Publishers are always busy casting horoscopes 
for their new finds. How the benign planets must 



_, SHANDYGAFF 117 

have twirled in happy curves when Harold Bell 
Wright was born, if one may credit his familiar 
mage, Elsbury W. Reynolds! But the fame that 
is built merely on publishers' press sheets does not 
dig very deep in the iron soil of time. We are 
all only raft-builders, as Lord Dunsany tells us 
in his little parable; even the raft that Homer 
made for Helen must break up some day. Who 
in these States knows the works of Nat Gould? 
Twelve million of his dashing paddock novels have 
been sold in England, but he is as unknown here 
as is Preacher Wright in England. What is so 
dead as a dead best seller? Sometimes it is the 
worst sellers that come to life, roll away the stone, 
and an angel is found sitting laughing in the 
sepulchre. Let me quote Mr. McFee once more: 
"I have no taste for blurb, but I cannot refuse 
facts." 

William M. P. McFee was born at sea in 1881. 
His father, an English skipper, was bringing his 
vessel toward the English coast after a long voyage. 
His mother was a native of Nova Scotia. They 
settled in New Southgate, a northern middle-class 
suburb of London, and here McFee was educated 
in the city schools of which the first pages of Cas- 
uals of the Sea give a pleasant description. Then 
he went to a well-known grammar school at Bury 
St. Edmunds in Suffolk — what we would call over 



118 SHANDYGAFF 

here a high school. He was a quiet, sturdy boy, 
and a first-rate cricketer. 

At sixteen he was apprenticed to a big engineer- 
ing firm in Aldersgate. This is one of the oldest 
streets in London, near the Charterhouse, Smith- 
field Market, and the famous "Bart's" Hospital. 
In fact, the office of the firm was built over one 
of the old plague pits of 1665. His father had died 
several years before; and for the boy to become an 
apprentice in this well-known firm Mrs. McFee 
had to pay three hundred pounds sterling. McFee 
has often wondered just what he got for the 
money. However, the privilege of paying to be 
better than someone else is an established way of 
working out one's destiny in England, and at the 
time the mother and son knew no better than to 
conform. You will find this problem, and the 
whole matter of gentility, cuttingly set out in 
Aliens. 

After three years as an apprentice, McFee was 
sent out by the firm on various important engineer- 
ing jobs, notably a pumping installation at Tring, 
which he celebrated in a pamphlet of very credit- 
able juvenile verses, for which he borrowed Mr. 
Kipling's mantle. This was at the time of the 
Boer War, when everybody in trousers who wrote 
verses was either imitating Kipling or reacting 
from him. 



SHANDYGAFF 119 

His engineering work gave young McFee a 
powerful interest in the lives and thoughts of the 
working classes. He was strongly influenced by 
socialism, and all his spare moments were spent 
with books. He came to live in Chelsea with an 
artist friend, but he had already tasted life at first 
hand, and the rather hazy atmosphere of that 
literary and artistic utopia made him uneasy. 
His afternoons were spent at the British Museum 
reading room, his evenings at the Northampton 
Institute, where he attended classes, and even did a 
little lecturing of his own. Competent engineer 
as he was, that was never sufficient to occupy his 
mind. As early as 1902 he was writing short 
stories and trying to sell them. 

In 1905 his uncle, a shipmaster, offered him a 
berth in the engine room of one of his steamers, 
bound for Trieste. He jumped at the chance. 
Since then he has been at sea almost continuously, 
save for one year (1912-13) when he settled down 
in Nutley, New Jersey, to write. The reader of 
Aliens will be pretty familiar with Nutley by 
the time he reaches page 416. "Netley" is but a 
thin disguise. I suspect a certain liveliness in the 
ozone of Nutley. Did not Frank Stockton write 
some of his best tales there? Some day some 
literary meteorologist will explain how these 
intellectual anticyclones originate in such places as 



120 . SHANDYGAFF 

Nutley (N. J), Galesburg (111.), Port Washington 
(N. Y.), and Bryn Mawr (Pa.) 

The life of a merchantman engineer would not 
seem to open a fair prospect into literature. The 
work is gruelling and at the same time monoto- 
nous. Constant change of scene and absence of 
home ties are (I speak subject to correction) 
demoralizing; after the coveted chief's certificate 
is won, ambition has little further to look forward 
to. A small and stuffy cabin in the belly of the 
ship is not an inviting study. The works of Miss 
Corelli and Messrs. Haig and Haig are the only 
diversions of most of the profession. Art, litera- 
ture, and politics do not interest them. Picture post- 
cards, waterside saloons, and the ladies of the port 
are the glamour of life that they delight to honour. 

I imagine that Mr. Carville's remarkable ac- 
count (in Aliens) of his induction into the pro- 
fession of marine engineering has no faint colour 
of reminiscence in Mr. McFee's mind. The 
filth, the intolerable weariness, the instant neces- 
sity of the tasks, stagger the easygoing suburban 
reader. And only the other day, speaking of his 
work on a seaplane ship in the British Navy, Mr. 
McFee said some illuminating things about the 
life of an engineer: 

It is Sunday, and I have been working. Oh, yes, there is 
plenty of work to do in the world, I find, wherever I go. 



SHANDYGAFF 121 

But I cannot help wondering why Fate so often offers me the 
dirty end of the stick. Here I am, awaiting my commission 
as an engineer-officer of the R.N.R., and I am in the thick of 
it day after day. I don't mean, when I say "work," what 
you mean by work. I don't mean work such as my friend 
the Censor does, or my friend the N.E.O. does, nor my friends 
and shipmates, the navigating officer, the flying men, or the 
officers of the watch. I mean work, hard, sweating, nasty 
toil, coupled with responsibility. I am not alone. Most 
ships of the naval auxiliary are the same. 

I am anxious for you, a landsman, to grasp this particular 
fragment of the sorry scheme of things entire, that in no 
other profession have the officers responsible for the carrying 
out of the work to toil as do the engineers in merchantmen, 
in transports, in fleet auxiliaries. You do not expect the 
major to clear the waste-pipe of his regimental latrines. You 
do not expect the surgeon to superintend the purging of his 
bandages. You do not expect the navigators of a ship to 
paint her hull. You do not expect an architect to make bricks 
(sometimes without straw). You do not expect the barrister 
to go and repair the lock on the law courts door, or oil the 
fans that ventilate the halls of justice. Yet you do, collec- 
tively, tolerate a tradition by which the marine engineer 
has to assist, overlook, and very often perform work corre- 
sponding precisely to the irrelevant chores mentioned above, 
which are in other professions relegated to the humblest 
and roughest of mankind. I blame no one. It is tradition, 
a most terrible windmill at which to tilt; but I conceive 
it my duty to set down once at least the peculiar nature of an 
engineer's destiny. I have had some years of it, and I know 
what I am talking about. 

The point to distinguish is that the engineer not only has 
the responsibility, but he has, in nine cases out of ten, to do it. 



122 SHANDYGAFF 

He, the officer, must befoul his person and derange his hours 
of rest and recreation, that others may enjoy. He must be 
available twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, at sea 
or in port. Whether chief or the lowest junior, he must be 
ready to plunge instantly to the succour of the vilest piece 
of mechanism on board. When coaling, his lot is easier 
imagined than described. 

The remarkable thing to note is that Mr. 
McFee imposed upon these laborious years of 
physical toil a strenuous discipline of intellect as 
well. He is a born worker: patient, dogged, 
purposeful. His years at sea have been to him a 
more fruitful curriculum than that of any univer- 
sity. The patient sarcasm with which he speaks 
of certain Oxford youths of his acquaintance 
does not escape me. His sarcasm is just and on 
the target. He has stood as Senior Wrangler in a 
far more exacting viva voce — the University of the 
Seven Seas. 

If I were a college president, out hunting for a 
faculty, I would deem that no salary would be too 
big to pay for the privilege of getting a man like 
McFee on my staff. He would not come, of 
course! But how he has worked for his mastery 
of the art of life and the theory thereof! When 
his colleagues at sea were dozing in their deck 
chairs or rattling the bones along the mahogany, 
he was sweating in his bunk, writing or reading. 



SHANDYGAFF 123 

He has always been deeply interested in painting, 
and no gallery in any port he visited ever escaped 
him. These extracts from some of his letters will 
show whether his avocations were those of most 
engineers : 

As I crossed the swing-bridge of the docks at Garston 
(Liverpool) the other day, and saw the tapering spars sil- 
houetted against the pale sky, and the zinc-coloured river 
with its vague Cheshire shores dissolving in mist, it occurred 
to me that if an indulgent genie were to appear and make me 
an offer I would cheerfully give up writing for painting. 
As it is, I see things in pictures and I spend more time in the 
Walker Gallery than in the library next door. 

I've got about all I can get out of books, and now I don't 
relish them save as memories. The reason for my wish, I 
suppose, is that character, not incident, is my metier. And 
you can draw character, paint character, but you can't very 
well blat about it, can you? 

I am afraid Balzac's job is too big for anybody nowadays. 
The worst of writing men nowadays is their horrible ignor- 
ance of how people live, of ordinary human possibilities. 

A . is always pitching into me for my insane ideas about 

"cheap stuff." He says I'm on the wrong tack and I'll be a 
failure if I don't do what the public wants. I said I didn't 
care a blue curse what the public wanted, nor did I worry 
much if I never made a big name. All I want is to do some 
fine and honourable work, to do it as well as I possibly could, 
and there my responsibility ended. . . . To hell with 
writing, I want to feel and seel 

I am laying in a gallon of ink and a couple of cwt. of paper, 
to the amusement of the others, who imagine I am a mer- 



124 SHANDYGAFF 

chant of some sort who has to transact business at sea because 
Scotland yard are after him ! 



His kit for every voyage, besides the gallon of ink 
and the hundredweight of foolscap, always in- 
cluded a score of books, ranging from Livy or 
Chaucer to Gorky and histories of Italian art. 
Happening to be in New York at the time of the 
first exhibition in this country of "futurist" pic- 
tures, he entered eagerly into the current dis- 
cussion in the newspaper correspondence columns. 
He wrote for a leading London journal an article 
on "The Conditions of Labour at Sea." He 
finds time to contribute to the Atlantic Monthly 
pieces of styptic prose that make zigzags on the 
sphygmograph of the editor. His letters written 
weekly to the artist friend he once lived with in 
Chelsea show a humorous and ironical mind rang- 
ing over all topics that concern cultivated men. 
I fancy he could out-argue many a university 
professor on Russian fiction, or Michelangelo, or 
steam turbines. 

When one says that McFee found little intel- 
lectually in common with his engineering col- 
leagues, that is not to say that he was a prig. 
He was interested in everything that they were, 
but in a great deal more, too. And after obtaining 
his extra chief's certificate from the London 



SHANDYGAFF 125 

Board of Trade, with a grade of ninety-eight per 
cent., he was not inclined to rest on his gauges. 

In 1912 he took a walking trip from Glasgow to 
London, to gather local colour for a book he had 
long meditated; then he took ship for the United 
States, where he lived for over a year writing 
hard. Neither Aliens nor Casuals of the Sea, which 
he had been at work on for years, met with the 
favour of New York publishers. He carried his 
manuscripts around the town until weary of that 
amusement; and when the United Fruit Company 
asked him to do some engineering work for them 
he was not loath to get back into the old harness. 
And then came the war. 

Alas, it is too much to hope that the Cunard 
Company will ever officer a vessel as I have sug- 
gested at the outset of these remarks. But I 
made my proposal not wholly at random, for in 
Conrad, Kipling, and McFee, all three, there is 
something of the same artistic creed. In those 
two magnificent prefaces — to A Personal Rec- 
ord and to The Nigger of the Narcissus — 
Conrad has set down, in words that should be 
memorable to every trafficker in ink, his concep- 
tion of the duty of the man of letters. They 
can never be quoted too often: 

"All ambitions are lawful except those which 
climb upward on the miseries or credulities of 



126 SHANDYGAFF 

mankind. . . . The sight of human affairs 
deserves admiration and pity. And he is not 
insensible who pays them the undemonstrative 
tribute of a sigh which is not a sob, and of a smile 
which is not a grin." 

That is the kind of tribute that Mr. McFee has 
paid to the Gooderich family in Casuals of the 
Sea. Somewhere in that book he has uttered 
the immortal remark that "The world belongs 
to the Enthusiast who keeps cool." I think there 
is much of himself in that aphorism, and that the 
cool enthusiast, the benevolent marbleheart, has 
many fine things in store for us. 

And there is one other sentence in Casuals of 
the Sea that lingers with me, and gives a just 
trace of the author's mind. It is worth remem- 
bering, and I leave it with you: 

" She considered a trouble was a trouble and to 
be treated as such, instead of snatching the knot- 
ted cord from the hand of God and dealing 
murderous blows." 



RHUBARB 

WE USED to call him Rhubarb, by reason 
of his long russet beard, which we im- 
agined trailing in the prescriptions as he 
compounded them, imparting a special potency. 
He was a little German druggist — Deutsche 
Apotheker — and his real name was Friedrich Wil- 
helm Maximilian Schulz. 

The village of Kings is tucked away in Long 
Island, in the Debatable Land where the gener- 
ous boundary of New York City zigzags in a sport- 
ing way just to permit horse racing at Belmont 
Park. It is the most rustic corner of the City. 
To most New Yorkers it is as remote as Helgo- 
land and as little known. It has no movie 
theatre, no news-stand, no cigar store, no village 
atheist. The railroad station, where one hundred 
and fifty trains a day do not stop, might well be 
mistaken for a Buddhist shrine, so steeped in dis- 
creet melancholy is it. The Fire Department con- 
sists of an old hose wagon first used to extinguish 
fires kindled by the Republicans when Rutherford 
B. Hayes was elected. In the weather-beaten 
Kings Lyceum "East Lynne" is still per- 

127 



128 SHANDYGAFF 

formed once a year. People who find Quogue 
and Cohasset too exciting, move to Kings to cool 
off. The only way one can keep servants out 
there is by having the works of Harold Bell 
Wright in the kitchen for the cook to read. 

Stout-hearted Mr. Schulz came to Kings long 
ago. There is quite a little German colony there. 
With a delicatessen store on one side of him and 
a man who played the flute on the other, he felt 
hardly at all expatriated. The public house on 
the corner serves excellent Rheingold, and on win- 
ter evenings Friedrich and Minna would sit by the 
stove at the back of the drugstore with a jug of 
amber on the table and dream of Stuttgart. 

It did not take me long to find out that apothe- 
cary Schulz was an educated man. At the rear 
of the store hung two diplomas of which he was 
very proud. One was a certificate from the Stutt- 
gart Oberrealschule; the other his license to 
practise homicidal pharmacy in the German 
Empire, dated 1880. He had read the "Kritik der 
reinen Vernunft", and found it more interesting 
than Henry James, he told me. Julia and I used 
to drop into his shop of an evening for a mug of hot 
chocolate, and always fell into talk. His Minna, a 
frail little woman with a shawl round her shoulders, 
would come out into the store and talk to us, too, 
and their pet dachshund would frolic at our feet. 



SHANDYGAFF 129 

They were a quaint couple, she so white and shy 
and fragile; he ruddy, sturdy, and positive. 

It was not till I told him of my years spent at a 
German University that he really showed me the 
life that lay behind his shopman activity. We 
sometimes talked German together, and he took 
me into their little sitting room to see his photo- 
graphs of home scenes at Stuttgart. It was over 
thirty years since he had seen German soil, but 
still his eyes would sparkle at the thought. He 
and Minna, being childless, dreamed of a return 
to the Fatherland as their great end in life. 

What an alluring place the little drugstore was ! 
I was fascinated by the rows and rows of gleam- 
ing bottles labelled with mysterious Latin abbre- 
viations. There were cases of patent remedies — 
Mexican Mustang Liniment, Swamp Root, Dan- 
derine, Conway's Cobalt Pills, Father Finch's 
Febrifuge, Spencer's Spanish Specific. Soap, tal- 
cum, cold cream, marshmallows, tobacco, jars of 
rock candy, what a medley of paternostrums ! 
And old Rhubarb himself, in his enormous baggy 
trousers — infinite breeches in a little room, as 
Julia used to say. 

I wish I could set him down in all his rich 
human flavour. The first impression he gave 
was one of cleanness and good humour. He was 
always in shirtsleeves, with suspenders forming an 



130 SHANDYGAFF 

X across his broad back; his shirt was fresh 
laundered, his glowing beard served as cravat. 
He had a slow, rather ponderous speech, 
with deep gurgling gutturals and a decrescendo 
laugh, slipping farther and farther down into 
his larynx. Once, when we got to know each 
other fairly well, I ventured some harmless jest 
about Barbarossa. He chuckled; then his face 
grew grave. "I wish Minna could have the 
beard," he said. "Her chest is not strong. It 
would be a fine breast-protector for her. But 
me, because I am strong like a horse, I have it 
all!" He thumped his chest ruefully with his 
broad, thick hand. 

Despite his thirty years in America, good 
Schulz was still the Deutsche Apotheker and not 
at all the American druggist. He had installed 
a soda fountain as a concession, but it puzzled him 
sorely, and if he was asked for anything more com- 
plex than chocolate ice cream soda he would 
shake his head solemnly and say : " That I have not 
got." Motorists sometimes turned off the Jericho 
turnpike and stopped at his shop asking for banana 
splits or grape juice highballs, or frosted pineapple 
fizz. But they had to take chocolate ice cream 
soda or nothing. Sometimes in a fit of absent- 
mindedness he would turn his taps too hard and 
the charged water would spout across the imita- 



SHANDYGAFF 131 

tion marble counter. He would wag his beard 
deprecatingly and mutter a shamefaced apology, 
smiling again when the little black dachshund 
came trotting to sniff at the spilt soda and rasp 
the wet floor with her bright tongue. 

At the end of September he shut up the soda 
fountain gladly, piling it high with bars of castile 
soap or cartons of cod liver oil. Then Minna 
entered into her glory as the dispenser of hot 
chocolate which seethed and sang in a tall silvery 
tank with a blue gas burner underneath. Th(is she 
served in thick china mugs with a clot of whipped 
cream swimming on top. Julia would buy a box 
of the cheese crackers that Schulz kept in stock 
specially for her, and give several to the sleek 
little black bitch that stood pleading with her 
quaint turned-out fore-feet placed on Julia's 
slippers. Schulz, beaming serenely behind a 
pyramid of "intense carnation " bottles on his per- 
fume counter, would chuckle at the antics of his 
pet. "Ah, he is a wise little dog!" he would 
exclaim with naive pride. "He knows who is 
friendly!" He always called the little dog "he," 
which amused us. 

On Sunday afternoon the drugstore was closed 
from one to five, and during those hours Schulz 
took his weekly walk, accompanied by the dog 
which plodded desperately after him on her short 



132 SHANDYGAFF 

legs. Sometimes we met him swinging along the 
by-roads, flourishing a cudgel and humming to 
himself. Whenever he saw a motor coming he 
halted, the little black dachshund would look 
up at him, and he would stoop ponderously down, 
pick her up and carry her in his arms until all 
danger was past. 

As the time went on he and I used to talk a good 
deal about the war. Minna, pale and weary, 
would stand behind her steaming urn, keeping 
the shawl tight round her shoulders; Rhubarb 
and I would argue without heat upon the latest 
news from the war zone. I had no zeal for con- 
verting the old fellow from his views; I understood 
his sympathies and respected them. Reports of 
atrocities troubled him as much as they did me; 
but the spine of his contention was that the Ger- 
man army was unbeatable. He got out his 
faded discharge ticket from the Wiirtemberger 
Landsturm to show the perfect system of the 
Imperial military organization. In his desk at 
the back of the shop he kept a war map cut from 
a Sunday supplement and over this we would 
argue, Schulz breathing hard and holding his 
beard aside in one hand as he bent over the paper. 
When other customers came in, he would put the 
map away with a twinkle, and the topic was 
dropped. But often the glass top of the perfume 



SHANDYGAFF 133 

counter was requisitioned as a large-scale battle- 
ground, and the pink bottle of rose water set to 
represent Von Hindenburg while the green phial 
of smelling salts was Joffre or Brussilov. We 
fought out the battle of the Marne pretty com- 
pletely on the perfume counter. "Warte doch!" 
he would cry. "Just wait! You will see! All 
the world is against her, but Germany will win!" 

Poor Minna was always afraid her husband and 
I would quarrel. She knew well how opposite 
our sympathies were; she could not understand 
that our arguments were wholly lacking in per- 
sonal animus. When I told him of the Allies' 
growing superiority in aircraft Rhubarb would 
retort by showing me clippings about the German 
trench fortifications, the "pill boxes" made of 
solid cement. I would speak of the deadly curtain 
fire of the British; he would counter with mys- 
terious allusions to Krupp. And his conclusions 
were always the same. "Just wait! Germany 
will win!" And he would stroke his beard plac- 
idly. "But, Fritz!" Minna used to cry in a 
panic, "The gentleman might think differently!" 
Rhubarb and I would grin at each other, I would 
buy a tin of tobacco, and we would say good 
night. 

How dear is the plain, unvarnished human 
being when one sees him in a true light! Schulz's 



134 SHANDYGAFF 

honest, kindly face seemed to me to typify all 
that I knew of the finer qualities of the Germans; 
the frugal simplicity, the tenderness, the proud, 
stiff rectitude. He and I felt for each other, I 
think, something of the humorous friendliness of 
the men in the opposing trenches. Chance had 
cast us on different sides of the matter. But 
when I felt tempted to see red, to condemn the 
Germans en masse, to chant litanies of hate, I used 
to go down to the drugstore for tobacco or a mug 
of chocolate. Rhubarb and I would argue it out. 

But that was a hard winter for him. The grow- 
ing anti-German sentiment in the neighbour- 
hood reduced his business considerably. Then 
he was worried over Minna. Often she did not 
appear in the evenings, and he would explain 
that she had gone to bed. I was all the more sur- 
prised to meet her one very snowy Sunday after- 
noon, sloshing along the road in the liquid mire, 
the little dog squattering sadly behind, her small 
black paws sliding on the ice-crusted paving. 
"What on earth are you doing outdoors on a day 
like this?" I said. 

"Fritz had to go to Brooklyn, and I thought he 
would be angry if Lischen didn't get her airing.'* 

"You take my advice and go home and get into 
some dry clothes," I said severely. 

Soon after that I had to go away for three 



SHANDYGAFF 135 

weeks. I was snowbound in Massachusetts for 
several days; then I had to go to Montreal on 
urgent business. Julia went to the city to visit 
her mother while I was away, so we had no news 
from Kings. 

We got back late one Sunday evening. The 
plumbing had frozen in our absence; when I lit the 
furnace again, pipes began to thaw and for an 
hour or so we had a lively time. In the course of 
a battle with a pipe and a monkey wrench I 
sprained a thumb, and the next morning I stopped 
at the drug-store on my way to the train to get 
some iodine. 

Rhubarb was at his prescription counter weigh- 
ing a little cone of white powder in his apothe- 
cary's scales. He looked far from well. There 
were great pouches under his eyes; his beard was 
unkempt; his waistcoat spotted with food stains. 
The lady waiting received her package, and went 
out. Rhubarb and I grasped hands. 

"Well," I said, "what do you think now about 
the war? Did you see that the Canadians took a 
mile of trenches five hundred yards deep last 
week? Do you still think Germany will win?" 
To my surprise he turned on his heel and began 
apparently rummaging along a row of glass jars. 
His gaze seemed to be fastened upon a tall bottle 
containing ethyl alcohol. At last he turned 



136 SHANDYGAFF 

round. His broad, naive face was quivering like 
blanc-mange. 

"What do I care who wins?" he said. "What 
does it matter to me any more? Minna is dead. 
She died two weeks ago of pneumonia." 

As I stood, not knowing what to say, there was 
a patter along the floor. The little dachshund 
came scampering into the shop and frisked about 
my feet. 



THE HAUNTING BEAUTY OF 
STRYCHNINE 

A LITTLE-KNOWN TOWN OF UNEARTHLY BEAUTY 

SLOWLY, reluctantly (rather like a vers 
libre poem) the quaint little train comes to 
a stand. Along the station platform each 
of the fiacre drivers seizes a large dinner-bell and 
tries to outring the others. You step from the 
railway carriage — and instantly the hellish din of 
those droschky bells faints into a dim, far-away 
tolling. Your eye has caught the superb sweep 
of the Casa Grande beetling on its crag. Over the 
sapphire canal where the old men are fishing for 
sprats, above the rugged scarp where the blue- 
bloused ouvriers are quarrying the famous cham- 
pagne cheese, you see the Gothic transept of the 
Palazzio Ginricci, dour against a nacre sky. An 
involuntary tremolo eddies down your spinal 
marrow. The Gin Palace, you murmur. . . . 
At last you are in Strychnine. 

Unnoted by Baedeker, unsung by poets, un- 
rhapsodied by press agents — there lurks the little 
town of Strychnine in that far and untravelled 

137 



138 SHANDYGAFF 

corner where France, Russia, and Liberia meet 
in an unedifying Zollverein. The strychnine 
baths have long been famous among physicians, 
but the usual ruddy tourist knows them not. The 
sorrowful ennui of a ten-hour journey on the 
B. V. D. Chemise de fer (with innumerable ex- 
aminations of luggage), while it has kept out the 
contraband Swiss cheese which is so strictly inter- 
dicted, has also kept away the rich and garrulous 
tourist. But he who will endure to the end that 
tortuous journey among flat fields of rye and 
parsimony, will find himself well rewarded. The 
long tunnel through Mondragone ends at length, 
and you find yourself on the platform with the 
droschky bells clanging in your ears and the ineff- 
able majesty of the Casa Grande crag soaring be- 
hind the jade canal. 

The air was chill, and I buttoned my surtout 
tightly as I stepped into the curious seven-wheeled 
sforza lettered Hotel Decameron. We rumbled 
andante espressivo over the hexagonal cobbles of 
the Chaussee d'Arsenic, crossed the mauve canal 
and bent under the hanging cliffs of the cheese 
quarries. I could see the fishwives carrying great 
trays of lampreys and lambrequins toward the fish 
market. It is curious what quaintly assorted im- 
pressions one receives in the first few minutes in a 
strange place. I remember noticing a sausage 



SHANDYGAFF 139 

kiosk in the marJd-platz where a man in a white 
coat was busily selling hot icons. They are de- 
livered fresh every hour from the Casa Grande 
(the great cheese cathedral) on the cliff. 

The Hotel Decameron is named after Boccaccio, 
who was once a bartender there. It stands in a 
commanding position on the Place Nouveau Riche 
overlooking the Casino and the odalisk erected by 
Edward VII in memory of his cure. After two 
weeks of the strychnine baths the merry monarch 
is said to have called for a corncob pipe and a 
plate of onions, after which he made his escape 
by walking over the forest track to the French 
frontier, although previous to this he had not 
walked a kilometer without a cane since John Bull 
won the Cowes regatta. The haut ton of the sec- 
tion in which the Hotel Decameron finds itself 
can readily be seen by the fact that the campa- 
nile of the Duke of Marmalade fronts on the rue 
Sauterne, just across from the barroom of the 
H6tel. The antiquaries say there is an under- 
ground corridor between the two. 

The fascinations of a stay in Strychnine are 
manifold. I have a weak heart, so I did not try 
the baths, although I used to linger on the terrace 
of the Casino about sunset to hear Tinpanni's band 
and eat a bronze bowl of Kerosini's gooseberry 
fool. I spent a great deal of my time exploring 



140 SHANDYGAFF 

the chief glory of the town, the Casa Grande, 
which stands on the colossal crag honeycombed 
underneath with the shafts and vaults of the 
cheese mine. There is nothing in the world more 
entrancing than to stand (with a vinaigrette at 
one's nose) on the ramp of the Casa, looking down 
over the ochre canal, listening to the hoarse 
shouts of the workmen as they toil with pick and 
shovel, laying bare some particularly rich lode of 
the pale, citron-coloured cheese which will some 
day make Strychnine a place of pelSrinage for all 
the world. Pay homage to the fromage is a rough 
translation of the motto of the town, which is car- 
ved in old Gothic letters on the apse of the Casa 
itself. Limberg, Gruyere, Alkmaar, Neufchatel, 
Camembert and Hoboken — all these famous 
cheeses will some day pale into whey before the 
puissance of the Strychnine curd. I was signally 
honoured by an express invitation of the bur- 
gomaster to be present at a meeting of the Cheese- 
mongers' Guild at the Rathaus. The Kurd- 
meister, who is elected annually by the town coun- 
cil, spoke most eloquently on the future of the 
cheese industry, and a curious rite was performed. 
Before the entrance of the ceremonial cheese, 
which is cut by the Kurdmeister himself, all those 
present donned oxygen masks similar to those 
devised by the English to combat the German 



SHANDYGAFF 141 

poison-gas. And I learned that oxygen helmets 
are worn by the workmen in the quarries to pre- 
vent prostration. 

It was with unfeigned regret that I found my 
fortnight over. I would gladly have lingered in 
the medieval cloisters of the Gin Palace, and sat 
for many mornings under the pistachio trees on 
the terrace sipping my verre of native wine. But 
duties recalled me to the beaten paths of travel, 
and once more I drove in the old-fashioned am- 
bulance to catch my even more old-fashioned train. 
The B. V. D. trains only leave Strychnine when 
there is a stern wind, as otherwise the pungent 
fumes of the cheese carried in the luggage van are 
very obnoxious to the passengers. Some day 
some American efficiency expert will visit the 
town and teach them to couple their luggage van 
on to the rear of the train. But till then Strych- 
nine will be to me, and to every other traveller 
who may chance that way, a fragrant memory. 

And as you enter the tunnel, the last thing you 
see is the onyx canal and the old women fishing 
for lambrequins and palfreys. 



INGO 

"ZUM ANDENKEN*' 

THE first night we sat down at the inn 
table for supper I lost my heart to Ingo! 
Ingo was just ten years old. He wore 
a little sailor suit of blue and white striped 
linen; his short trousers showed chubby brown 
calves above his white socks; his round golden 
head cropped close in the German fashion. His 
blue eyes were grave and thoughtful. By great 
good fortune we sat next each other at table, and 
in my rather grotesque German I began a conver- 
sation. How careful Ingo was not to laugh at the 
absurdities of my syntax! How very courteous 
he was! 

Looking back into the mysterious panorama of 
pictures that we call memory, I can see the long 
dining room of the old gasthaus in the Black 
Forest, where two Americans on bicycles appeared 
out of nowhere and asked for lodging. They 
were the first Americans who had ever been seen 
in that remote valley, and the Gasthaus zur 
Krone ("the Crown Inn") found them very 

142 



SHANDYGAFF 143 

amusing. Perhaps you have never seen a coun- 
try tavern in the Schwarzwald? Then you have 
something to live for. A long, low building with 
a moss-grown roof and tremendous broad eaves 
sheltering little galleries; and the barn under the 
same roof for greater warmth in winter. One 
side of the house was always strong with an excel- 
lent homely aroma of cow and horse; one had only 
to open a door in the upper hall, a door that 
looked just like a bedroom entrance, to find one- 
self in the haymow. There I used to lie for hours 
reading, and listening to the summer rain thud- 
ding on the shingles. Sitting in the little gallery 
under the eaves, looking happily down the white 
road where the yellow coach brought the mail 
twice a day, one could see the long vista of the 
valley, the women with bright red jackets work- 
ing in the fields, and the dark masses of forest 
on the hillside opposite. There was much rain 
that summer; the mountains were often veiled all 
day long in misty shreds of cloud, and the two 
Americans sat with pipes and books at the long 
dining table, greeted by gales of laughter on the 
part of the robust landlord's niece when they 
essayed the native idiom. " Sie arbeiten immer!" 
she used to say; "Sie werden krank!" ("You're 
always working; you'll be ill!") 

There is a particular poignance in looking 



144 SHANDYGAFF 

back now on those happy days two years before 
the war. Nowhere in all the world, I suppose, 
are there more cordial, warmhearted, simple, 
human people than the South Germans. On the 
front of the inn there was a big yellow metal sign, 
giving the military number of the district, and 
the mobilization points for the Landsturm and 
the Landwehr, and we realized that even here the 
careful organization of the military power had 
numbered and ticketed every village. But what 
did it mean to us? War was a thing unthinkable 
in those days. We bicycled everywhere, climbed 
mountains, bathed in waterfalls, chatted fluent and 
unorthodox German with everyone we met, and 
played games with Ingo. 

Dear little Ingo! At the age when so many 
small boys are pert, impudent, self-conscious, he 
was the simplest, happiest, gravest little creature. 
His hobby was astronomy, and often I would find 
him sitting quietly in a corner with a book about 
the stars. On clear evenings we would walk 
along the road together, in the mountain hush 
that was only broken by the brook tumbling down 
the valley, and he would name the constellations 
for me. His little round head was thrilled through 
and through by the immense mysteries of space; 
sometimes at meal times he would fall into a muse, 
forgetting his beef and gravy. Once I asked him 



SHANDYGAFF 145 

at dinner what he was thinking of. He looked 
up with his clear gray-blue eyes and flashing 
smile: "Von den Sternen!" ("Of the stars.") 

The time after supper was reserved for games, 
in which Wolfgang, Ingo's smaller brother (aged 
seven), also took part. Our favourite pastimes 
were "Irrgarten" and "Galgenspiel," in which we 
found enormous amusement. Galgenspiel was 
Ingo's translation of "Hangman," a simple 
pastime which had sometimes entertained my own 
small brother on rainy days; apparently it was 
new in Germany. One player thinks of a word, 
and sets down on paper a dash for each letter in 
this word. It is the task of the other to guess 
the word, and he names the letters of the alphabet 
one by one. Every time he mentions a letter that 
is contained in the word you must set it down in 
its proper place in the word, but every time he 
mentions a letter that is not in the word you draw 
a portion of a person depending from a gallows; 
the object of course being for him to guess the 
word before you finish drawing the effigy. We 
played the game entirely in German, and I can 
still see Ingo's intent little face bent over my pre- 
posterous drawings, cudgelling his quick and 
happy little brain to spot the word before the 
hangman could finish his grim task. "Quick, 
Ingo!" I would cry. "You will get yourself 



146 SHANDYGAFF 

hung!" and he would laugh in his own lovable 
way. There was never a jollier way of learning a 
foreign language than by playing games with 
Ingo. 

The other favourite pastime was drawing mazes 
on paper, labyrinths of winding paths which must 
be traversed by a pencil point. The task was to 
construct a maze so complicated that the other 
could not find his way out, starting at the middle. 
We would sit down at opposite ends of the room 
to construct our mysteries of blind alleys and 
misleading passages, then each one would be 
turned loose in the "irrgarten " drawn by the other. 
Ingo would stand at my side while I tried in 
obstinate stupidity to find my way through his 
little puzzle; his eager heart inside his sailor 
blouse would pound like a drum when I was near- 
ing the dangerous places where an exit might be 
won. He would hold his breath so audibly, and 
his blue eyes would grow so anxious, that I always 
knew when not to make the right turning, and 
my pencil would wander on in hopeless despair 
until he had mercy on me and led me to freedom. 

After lunch every day, while waiting for the 
mail-coach to come trundling up the valley, Ingo 
and I used to sit in the little balcony under the 
eaves, reading. He introduced me to his 
favourite book Till Eulens / piegel ) and we sped 



7 



SHANDYGAFF 147 

joyously through the adventures of that immortal 
buffoon of German folk-lore. We took turns 
reading aloud: every paragraph or so I would 
appeal for an explanation of something. Gen- 
erally I understood well enough, but it was such 
a delight to hear Ingo strive to make the meaning 
plain. What a puckering of his bright boyish 
forehead, what a grave determination to elucidate 
the fable! What a mingling of ecstatic pride in 
having a grown man as pupil, with deference due 
to an elder. Ingo was a born gentleman and in 
his fiercest transports of glee never forgot his 
manners! I would make some purposely ludi- 
crous shot at the sense, and he would double up 
with innocent mirth. His clear laughter would 
ring out, and his mother, pacing a digestive stroll 
on the highway below us, would look up crying 
in the German way, "Gott! wie er freut sich!" 
The progress of our reading was held up by these 
interludes, but I could never resist the temptation 
to start Ingo explaining. 

Ingo having made me free of his dearest book, 
it was only fair to reciprocate. So one day 
Lloyd and I bicycled down to Freiburg, and 
there, at a heavenly "bookhandler's," I found a 
copy of * Treasure Island' in German. Then 
there was revelry in the balcony ! I read the tale 
aloud, and I wish R. L. S. might have seen the 



148 SHANDYGAFF 

shining of Ingo's eyes! Alas, the vividness of 
the story interfered with the little lad's sleep, and 
his mother was a good deal disturbed about this 
violent yarn we were reading together. How 
close he used to sit beside me as we read of the 
dark doings at the Admiral Benbow; and how his 
face would fall when, clear and hollow .from the 
sounding-board of the hills, came the quick clop, 
clop of the mail-man's horses. 

I don't know anything that has ever gone 
deeper in my memory than those hours spent 
with Ingo. I have a little snapshot of him I 
took the misty, sorrowful morning when I bicycled 
away to Basel and left the Gasthaus zur Krone 
in its mountain valley. The blessed little lad 
stands up erect and stiff in the formal German 
way, and I can see his blue eyes alight with friend- 
liness, and a little bit unhappy because his eccen- 
tric American comrade was going away and there 
would be no more afternoons with Till Eulen- 
spiegel on the balcony. I wonder if he thinks of 
me as often as I do of him? He gave me a glimpse 
into the innocent heaven of a child's heart that I 
can never forget. By now he is approaching six- 
teen, and I pray that whatever the war may take 
away from me it will spare me my Ingo. It is 
strange and sad to recall that his parting present 
to me was a drawing of a Zeppelin, upon which he 



SHANDYGAFF 149 

toiled manfully all one afternoon. I still have 
it in my scrap-book. 

And I wonder if he ever looks in the old copy of 
"HaufFs Marchen" that I bought for him in Frei- 
burg, and sees the English words that he was to 
learn how to translate when he should grow older ! 
As I remember them, they ran like this: 

For Ingo to learn English will very easy be 
If someone is as kind to him as he has been to me; 
Plays games with him, reads fairy tales, corrects all his mis- 
takes, 
And never laughs too loudly at the blunders that he makes — 
Then he will find, as I did, how well two pleasures blend: 
To learn a foreign language, and to make a foreign friend. 

If I love anybody in the world, I love Ingo. 
And that is why I cannot get up much enthusiasm 
for hymns of hate. , 



HOUSEBROKEN 

A FTER Simmons had been married two 
/ % years he began to feel as though he 
Ji ^needed a night off. But he hesitated to 
mention the fact, for he knew his wife would feel 
hurt to think that he could dream of an evening 
spent elsewhere than in their cosy sitting room. 
However, there were no two ways about it: the old 
unregenerate male in Simmons yearned for some- 
thing more exciting than the fireside armchair, 
the slippers and smoking jacket, and the quiet 
game of cards. Visions of the old riotous even- 
ings with the boys ran through his mind; a billiard 
table and the click of balls; the jolly conversation 
at the club, and glass after glass of that cold 
amber beer. The large freedom of the city streets 
at night, the warm saloons on every corner, the 
barrooms with their pyramids of bottles flashing 
in the gaslight — these were the things that made 
a man's life amusing. And here he was cooped 
up in a little cage in the suburbs like a tame cat! 

Thoughts of this kind had agitated Simmons for 
a long time, and at last he said something to Ethel. 
He had keyed himself up to meet a sharp .retort, 

150 



SHANDYGAFF 151 

some sarcastic comment about his preferring a 
beer garden to his own home, even an outburst 
of tears. But to his amazement Ethel took it 
quite calmly. 

"Why, yes, of course, dear," she said. "It'll 
do you good to have an evening with your friends. " 

A little taken aback, he asked whether she would 
rather he didn't go. 

"Why, no," she answered. "I shall have a 
lovely time. I won't be lonely." 

This was on Monday. Simmons planned to go 
out on Friday night, meeting the boys for dinner 
at the club, and after that they would spend the 
evening at Boelke's bowling alley. All the week 
he went about in a glow of anticipation. At the 
office he spoke in an offhand way of the pleasant 
evenings a man can have in town, and pitied the 
prosaic beggars who never stir from the house at 
night. 

On Friday evening he came home hurriedly, 
staying just long enough to shave and change his 
collar. Ethel had on a pretty dress and seemed 
very cheerful. A strange sinking came over him 
as he saw the familiar room shining with firelight 
and the shabby armchair. 

"Would you rather I stayed at home?" he 
asked. 

"Not a bit," she said, quite as though she meant 



15% SHANDYGAFF 

it. "Diana has a steak in the oven, and I've got 
a new book to read. I won't wait up for you." 

He kissed her and went off. 

When he got on the trolley a sudden revulsion 
struck him. He was tired and wanted to go 
home. Why on earth spend the evening with a 
lot of drunken rowdies when he might be at his 
own hearth watching Ethel's face bent over her 
sewing? He saw little enough of her anyway. 

At the door of the club he halted. Inside, the 
crowd was laughing, shouting jests, dicing for 
cocktails. Suddenly he turned and ran. 

He cursed himself for a fool, but none the less 
an irresistible force seemed to draw him home. 
On the car he sat glum and silent, wondering how 
all the other men could read their papers so 
contentedly. 

At last he reached the modest little suburb. He 
hurried along the street and had almost entered 
his gate when he paused. 

Through the half-drawn curtains he could see 
Ethel sitting comfortably by the lamp. She was 
reading, and the cat was in her lap. His heart 
leaped with a great throb. But how could he go 
in now? It was barely eight o'clock. After all 
his talk about a man's need of relaxation and 
masculine comradeship — why, she would never 
stop laughing! He turned and tiptoed away. 



SHANDYGAFF 153 

That evening was a nightmare for Simmons. 
Opposite his house was a little suburban park, and 
thither he took himself. For a long while he sat 
on a bench cursing. Twice he started for the 
trolley, and again returned. It was a damp 
autumn night; little by little the chill pierced his 
light coat and he sneezed. Up and down the 
little park he tramped, biting a dead cigar. Once 
he went as far as the drugstore and bought a box 
of crackers. 

" At last — it seemed years — the church chimes 
struck ten and he saw the lights go out in his 
house. He forced himself to make twenty-five 
more trips around the gravel walk and then he 
could wait no longer. Shivering with weariness 
and cold, he went home. 

He let himself in with his latch key and tiptoed 
upstairs. He leaned over the bed and Ethel stir- 
red sleepily. 

"What time is it, dear?" she murmured. 
"You're early, aren't you?" 

"One o'clock," he lied bravely — and just then 
the dining-room clock struck half -past ten and sup- 
ported him. 

" Did you have a good time? " 

"Bully— perfectly bully," he said. "There's 
nothing like a night with the boys now and 
then." 



THE HILARITY OF HILAIRE 

I REMEMBER some friends of mine telling 
me how they went down to Horsham, in 
Sussex, to see Hilaire Belloc. They found 
him in the cellar, seated astraddle of a gigantic 
wine-cask just arrived from France, about to 
proceed upon the delicate (and congenial) task of 
bottling the wine. He greeted them like jovial 
Silenus, and with competitive shouts of laughter 
the fun went forward. The wine was strained, 
bottled, sealed, labelled, and binned, the master 
of the vintage initiating his young visitors into the 
rite with bubbling and infectious gaiety — impro- 
vising verses, shouting with merriment, full of an 
energy and vivacity almost inconceivable to Saxon 
phlegm. My friends have always remembered it 
as one of the most diverting afternoons of their 
lives; and after the bottling was done and all hands 
thoroughly tired, he took them a swinging tramp 
across the Sussex Downs, talking hard all the way. 

I 

That is the Belloc we all know and love: vigor- 
ous, Gallic, bursting with energy, hospitality, and 

154 



SHANDYGAFF 155 

wit: the enfant terrible of English letters for the 
past fifteen years. Mr. Joyce Kilmer's edition of 
Belloc's verses is very welcome.* His introduc- 
tion is charming: the tribute of an understanding 
lover. Perhaps he labours a little in proving 
that Belloc is essentially a poet rather than a 
master of prose; perhaps too some of his judg- 
ments of Pater, Hardy, Scott, and others of whom 
one has heard, are precipitate and smack a little 
of the lecture circuit: but there is much to be grate- 
ful for in his affectionate and thoughtful tribute. 
Perhaps we do not enough realize how outstand- 
ing and how engaging a figure Mr. Belloc is. 

Hilaire Belloc is of soldierly, artistic, and let- 
tered blood. Four of his great-uncles were gen- 
erals under Napoleon. The father of his grand- 
mother fought under Soult at Corunna. A 
brother of his grandmother was wounded at 
Waterloo. 

His grandmother, Louise Marie Swanton, who 
died in 1890, lived both in France and England, 
and was famous as the translator into French 
of Moore's "Life of Byron," "Uncle Tom's 
Cabin," and works by Dickens and Mrs. Gaskell, 
She married Hilaire Belloc, an artist, whose pic- 
tures are in the Louvre and many French mu- 



•Verses by Hilaire Belloc; with an introduction by Joyce Kilmer. New York: 
Laurence J. Gonune, 1916. 



156 SHANDYGAFF 

seums; his tomb may be seen in Pere la Chaise. 
Their son was Louis Swanton Belloc, a lawyer, 
who married an English wife. 

The only son of this couple was the present 
Hilaire Belloc, born at Lacelle St. Cloud, July 
27, 1870— the "Terrible Year" it was called— 
until 1914. 

Louis Belloc died in 1872, and as a very small 
child Hilaire went to live in Sussex, the gracious 
shire which both he and Rudyard Kipling have 
so often and so thrillingly commemorated. Slin- 
don, near Arundel, became his home, the rolling 
hills, clean little rivers, and picturesque villages 
of the South Downs moulded his boyish thoughts. 

In 1883 he went to the famous Catholic school 
at Edgbaston. Mr. Thomas Seccombe, in a 
recent article on Belloc (from which I dip a num- 
ber of biographical facts), quotes a description 
of him at this period: 

"I remember very well Belloc coming to the 
Oratory School — some time in '83, I suppose. 
He was a small, squat person, of the shaggy 
kind, with a clever face and sharp, bright eyes. 
Being amongst English boys, his instinctive com- 
bativeness made him assume a decidedly French 
pose, and this no doubt brought on him many a 
gibe, which, we may be equally sure, he was well 
able to return. I was amongst the older boys, 



SHANDYGAFF 157 

and saw little of him. But I recollect finding him 
one day studying a high wall (of the old Oratory 
Church, since pulled down). It turned out that 
he was calculating its exact height by some cryptic 
mathematical process which he proceeded to 
explain. I concealed my awe, and did not tell 
him that I understood nothing of his terms, his 
explanations, or deductions; it would have been 
unsuitable for a big fellow to be taught by a 
'brat/ In those days the boys used to act Latin 
plays of Terence, which enjoyed a certain celebrity, 
and from his first year Belloc was remarkable. 
His rendering of the impudent servant maid was 
the inauguration of a series of triumphs during 
his whole school career." 

In '89 Hilaire left school, and served for a 
year in the French field artillery, in a regiment 
stationed at Toul. Here he revived the Gallic 
heritage which was naturally his, learned to talk 
continually in French, and to drink wine. You 
will remember that in "The Path to Rome" 
he starts from Toul; but I cannot quote the pass- 
age; someone (who the devil is it?) has borrowed 
my copy. It is the perpetual fate of that book — 
everyone should have six copies. 

After the rough and saline company of French 
gunners it is a comical contrast to find him win- 
ning a scholarship at Balliol College, Oxford — 



158 SHANDYGAFF 

admittedly the most rarefied and azure-pedalled 
precinct in England. He matriculated at Balliol 
in January, 1895, and was soon known as one of the 
"characters" of the college. There was little of 
the lean and pallid clerk of Oxenford in his bear- 
ing: he was the Roman candle of the Junior 
Common Room, where the vivacious and robust 
humour of the barracks at Toul at first horrified 
and then captivated the men from the public 
schools. Alternately blasphemous and idolatrous 
he may have seemed to Winchester and Eton: 
a devil for work and a genius at play. He 
swam, wrestled, shouted, rode, drank, and de- 
bated, says Mr. Seccombe. He read strange 
books, swore strange oaths, and amazed his 
tutors by the fire and fury of his historical 
study. His rooms were a continual focus of noise: 
troops of friends, song, loud laughter, and night- 
long readings from Rabelais. And probably his 
battels, if they are still recorded in the Balliol 
buttery, would show a larger quantity of ale and 
wine consumed than by any other man who ever 
made drinking a fine art at Balliol. Some day 
perhaps some scholar will look the matter up. 

Balliol is not beautiful: more than any other of 
the older colleges in Oxford, she has suffered from 
the "restorations" of the 70's and 80's. It is a 
favourite jest to pretend to confuse her with the 



SHANDYGAFF 159 

Great Western Railway Station, which never 
fails to bring a flush to a Balliol cheek. But 
whatever the merciless hand of the architect has 
done to turn her into a jumble of sham Gothic 
spikes and corners, no one can doubt her whole- 
some democracy of intellect, her passion for sound 
scholarship, and the unsurpassable gift of her 
undergraduates for the delicately obscene. This 
may be the wake of a tradition inaugurated by 
Belloc; but I think it goes farther back than that. 
At any rate, in Oxford the young energumen 
found himself happy and merry beyond words: 
he worked brilliantly, was a notable figure in the 
Union debates, argued passionately against every 
conventional English tradition, and attacked au- 
thority, complacence, and fetichism of every kind. 
Never were dons of the donnish sort more bril- 
liantly twitted than by young Belloc. And, 
partly because of his failure to capture an All 
Souls fellowship (the most coveted prize of intel- 
lectual Oxford) the word "don" has retained a 
tinge of acid in Belloc's mind ever since. (Who 
can read without assentive chuckles his delicious 
"Lines to a Don!" It was the favourite of all 
worthy dons at Oxford when I was there.) He 
has never had any reverence for a man merely 
because he held a post of authority. 
Of the Balliol years Mr. Seccombe says : 



160 SHANDYGAFF 

"He was a few years older and more expe- 
rienced than most of his college friends, but had 
lost little of the intoxication, the contagion and 
the ringing laughter of earliest manhood. He 
dazzled and infected everyone with his mockery 
and his laughter. There never was such an 
undergraduate, so merry, so learned in medieval 
trifling and terminology, so perfectly spontaneous 
in rhapsody and extravaganza, so positive and 
final in his judgments — who spoke French, too, 
like a Frenchman, in a manner unintelligible to 
our public-school-French-attuned ears." 

No one can leave those Balliol years behind 
without some hope to quote the ringing song in 
which Belloc recalled them at the time of the 
Boer War. It is the perfect expression of joyful 
masculine life and overflowing fellowship. It 
echoes unforgettably in the mind. 



TO THE BALLIOL MEN STILL IN APRICA 

Years ago when I was at Balliol, 

Balliol men — and I was one — 
Swam together in winter rivers, 

Wrestled together under the sun. 
And still in the heart of us, Balliol, Balliol, 

Loved already, but hardly known, 
Welded us each of us into the others: 

Called a levy and chose her own. 



SHANDYGAFF 101 

Here is a House that armours a man 

With the eyes of a boy and the heart of a ranger, 
And a laughing way in the teeth of the world 

And a holy hunger and thirst for danger: 
Balliol made me, Balliol fed me, 

Whatever I had she gave me again: 
And the best of Balliol loved and led me, 

God be with you, Balliol men. 



I have said it before, and I say it again, 

There was treason done, and a false word spoken, 
And England under the dregs of men, 

And bribes about, and a treaty broken : 
But angry, lonely, hating it still, 

I wished to be there in spite of the wrong. 
My heart was heavy for Cumnor Hill 

And the hammer of galloping all day long. 



Galloping outward into the weather, 

Hands a-ready and battle in all: 
Words together and wine together 

And song together in Balliol Hall. 
Bare and single! Noble and few! . . . 

Oh! they have wasted you over the sea! 
The only brothers ever I knew, 

The men that laughed and quarrelled with me. 

Balliol made me, Balliol fed me, 

Whatever I had she gave me again; 

And the best of Balliol loved and led me, 
God be with you, Balliol men. 



162 SHANDYGAFF 

Belloc took a First in the Modern History 
School in 1895. No one ever experienced more 
keenly the tingling thrill of the eager student who 
finds himself cast into the heart of Oxford's 
abundant life: the thousands of books so gener- 
ously alive; the hundreds of acute and worthy 
rivals crossing steel on steel in play, work, and 
debate; the endless throb of passionate specula- 
tion into all the crowding problems of human 
history. The zest and fervour of those younger 
days he has never outgrown, and there are few 
writers of our time who have appealed so im- 
periously to the young. In the Oxford before 
the war all the undergraduates were reading 
Belloc: you would hardly find a college room that 
did not shelve one or two of his volumes. 

II 

There is no space to chronicle the life in detail. 
The romantic voyage to California, and marriage 
at twenty-six (Mrs. Belloc died in 1914); his life 
in Chelsea and then in Sussex; the books on 
Revolutionary France, on military history, biog- 
raphy and topography; the flashing essays, 
political satires, and whimsical burlesques that 
ran so swiftly from his pen — it did not take Eng- 
land long to learn that this man was very much 
alive. In 1903 he was naturalized as a British 



SHANDYGAFF 163 

subject, and humorously contemplated changing 
his name to "Hilary Bullock." In 1906 he joined 
the Liberal benches in the House of Commons, 
but the insurgent spirit that had cried out in 
college debates against the lumbering shams of 
British political life was soon stabbing at the 
party system. Here was a ringing voice indeed: 
one can hear that clear, scornful tenor startling 
the House with its acid arraignment of parliamen- 
tary stratagems and spoils. As Mr. Kilmer 
says, "British politicians will not soon forget 
the motion which Hilaire Belloc introduced one 
day in the early Spring of 1908, that the Party 
funds, hitherto secretly administered, be pub-r 
licly audited. His vigorous and persistent 
campaign against the party system has placed 
him, with Cecil Chesterton, in the very front ranks 
of those to whom the democrats of Great Britain 
must look for leadership and inspiration." 

Perhaps we can take issue with Mr. Kilmer in 
his estimate of Belloc's importance as a poet. He 
is a born singer, of course; his heart rises to a lyric 
just as his tongue to wine and argument and his 
legs to walking or saddle leather. But he writes 
poetry as every honest man should: in an imper- 
ative necessity to express a passing squall of 
laughter, anger, or reverence; and in earnest 
hope of being condemned by Mr. W. S. Braith- 



164 SHANDYGAFF 

waite, which happens to so few. His " The South 
Country" will make splendid many an anthology. 
But who shall say that his handful of verses, witty, 
debonair, bacchanalian, and tender, is his most 
important contribution? 

What needs to be said is that Belloc is an authen- 
tic child gotten of Rabelais. I can never forget a 
lecture I heard him give in the famous Examina- 
tion Schools at Oxford — that noble building con- 
secrated to human suffering, formerly housing 
the pangs of students and now by sad necessity a 
military hospital. Ruddy of cheek, a burly 
figure in his academic gown, without a scrap of 
notes and armed only with an old volume of 
Rabelais in the medieval French, he held us spell- 
bound for an hour and a half — or was it three 
hours? — with flashing extempore talk about this 
greatest figure of the Renaissance. 

Rabelais, he told us, was the symbolic figure of 
the incoming tide of Europe's rebirth in the 
sixteenth century. Rabelais, the priest, physi- 
cian, and compounder of a new fish sauce, held 
that life is its own justification, and need not be 
lived in doleful self-abasement. Do what you 
wish, enjoy life, be interested in a thousand things, 
feel a perpetual inquisitive delight in all the details 
of human affairs! The gospel of exuberance — that 
is Rabelais. Is it not Belloc, too? 



SHANDYGAFF 165 

Rabelais came from Touraine — the heart of 
Gaul, the island of light in which the tradition of 
civilization remained unbroken. One understands 
Rabelais better if one knows the Chinon wine, 
Belloc added. His writing is married to the soil 
and landscape from which he sprang. His extraor- 
dinary volatility proceeds from a mind packed 
full of curiosity and speculation. For an instance 
of his exuberance see his famous list of fools, in 
which all fools whatsoever that ever walked on 
earth are included. 

Now no one who loves Belloc can paddle in 
Rabelais without seeing that he, too, was sired from 
Chinon. Dip into Gargantua: there you will find 
the oinolatrous and gastrolatrous catalogues that 
Belloc daily delights in; the infectious droll patter 
of speech, piling quip on quip. Then look again 
into "The Path to Rome." How well does Mr. 
John Macy tell us "literature is not born spon- 
taneously out of life. Every book has its literary 
parentage, and criticism reads like an Old Test- 
ament chapter of 'begats.' Every novel was 
suckled at the breasts of older novels." 

* III 

In Belloc we find the perfect union of the 
French and English minds. Rabelaisian in fe- 
cundity, wit, and irrepressible sparkle, he is also of 



166 SHANDYGAFF 

English blood and sinew, wedded to the sweet 
Sussex weald. History, politics, economics, mili- 
tary topography, poetry, novels, satires, nonsense 
rhymes — all these we may set aside as the hundred 
curiosities of an eager mind. (The dons, by the 
way, say that in his historical work he generalizes 
too hastily; but was ever history more crisply 
written?) It is in the essays, the thousand little 
inquirendoes into the nature of anything, every- 
thing or nothing, that one comes closest to the real 
man. His prose leaps and sparks from the pen. 
It is whimsical, tender, biting, garrulous. It is 
familiar and unfettered as open-air talk. His 
passion for places — roads, rivers, hills, and inns; 
his dancing persiflage and buoyancy; his Bor- 
rovian love of vagabondage — these are the glories 
of a style that is quick, close-knit, virile, and vi- 
brant. Here Belloc ranks with Bunyan, Swift, 
and Defoe. 

Whoso dotes upon fine prose, prose interlaced 
with humour, pathos, and whim, orchestrated to a 
steady rhythm, coruscated with an exquisite 
tenderness for all that is lovable and high spirited 
on this dancing earth, go you now to some book- 
seller and procure for yourself a little volume 
called "A Picked Company" where Mr. E. V. 
Lucas has gathered some of the best of Mr. 
Belloc's pieces. Therein will you find love of 



SHANDYGAFF 167 

food, companionship, cider and light wines; 
love of children, artillery, and inns in the out- 
lands; love of salt water, great winds, and brown 
hills at twilight — in short, passionate devotion to 
all the dear devices that make life so sweet. Hear 
him on "A Great Wind": 

A great wind is every man's friend, and its strength is the 
strength of good fellowship; and even doing battle with it is 
something worthy and well chosen. It is health in us, I say, 
to be full of heartiness and of the joy of the world, and of 
whether we have such health our comfort in a great wind is a 
good test indeed. No man spends his day upon the moun- 
tains when the wind is out, riding against it or pushing forward 
on foot through the gale, but at the end of his day feels that 
he has had a great host about him. It is as though he had 
experienced armies. The days of high winds are days of 
innumerable sounds, innumerable in variation of tone and of 
intensity, playing upon and awakening innumerable powers 
in man. And the days of high wind are days in which a 
physical compulsion has been about us and we have met pres- 
sure and blows, resisted and turned them; it enlivens us with 
the simulacrum of war by which nations live, and in the just 
pursuit of which men in companionship are at their noblest. 

IV 

And lest all this disjointed talk about Belloc's 
prose seem but ungracious recognition of Mr. 
Kilmer's service in reminding us of the poems, 
let us thank him warmly for his essay. Let us 
thank him for impressing upon us that there are 



168 SHANDYGAFF 

living to-day men who write as nobly and simply 
as Belloc on Sussex, with this sweet broken music: 

I never get between the pines 

But I smell the Sussex air; 
Nor I never come on a belt of sand 

But my home is there. 
And along the sky the line of the Downs 

So noble and so bare. 

A lost thing could I never find, 

Nor a broken thing mend: 
And I fear I shall be all alone 

When I get towards the end. 
Who will there be to comfort me 

Or who will be my friend? 

I will gather and carefully make my friends 

Of the men of the Sussex Weald, 
They watch the stars from silent folds, 

They stiffly plough the field. 
By them and the God of the South Country 

My poor soul shall be healed. 

If I ever become a rich man, 

Or if ever I grow to be old, 
I will build a house with deep thatch 

To shelter me from the cold, 
And there shall the Sussex songs be sung 

And the story of Sussex told. 

I will hold my house in the high wood 

Within a walk of the sea, 
And the men that were boys when I was a boy 

Shall sit and drink with me. 



A CASUAL OF THE SEA 

He that will learn to pray, let him go to sea. 

— George Herbert. 

BOOKS sometimes make surprising connec- 
tions with life. Fifteen-year-old Tommy 
Jonkers, shipping as O. S. (ordinary 
seaman) on the S. S. Fernfield in Glasgow in 
1911, could hardly have suspected that the sec- 
ond engineer would write a novel and put him 
in it; or that that same novel would one day lift 
him out of focsle and galley and set him working 
for a publishing house on far-away Long Island. 
Is it not one more proof of the surprising power 
of the written word? 

For Tommy is not one of those who expect to 
find their names in print. The mere sight of his 
name on a newspaper page, in an article I wrote 
about him, brought (so he naively told me) tears 
to his eyes. Excellent, simple-hearted Tommy! 
How little did you think, when you signed on to 
help the Fernfield carry coal from Glasgow to 
Alexandria, that the long arm of the Miehle press 
was already waiting for you; that thousands of 

169 



170 SHANDYGAFF 

good people reading a certain novel would be 
familiar with your "round rosy face and clear 
sea-blue eyes." 

"Tommy" (whose real name is Drevis) was born 
in Amsterdam in 1896. His father was a fireman 
at sea, and contributed next to nothing to the 
support of Tommy and his pretty little sister 
Greta. They lived with their grandmother, near 
the quays in Amsterdam, where the masts of 
ships and the smell of tar interfered with their 
lessons. Bread and treacle for breakfast, black 
beans for lunch, a fine thick stew and plenty more 
bread for supper — that and the Dutch school 
where he stood near the top of his class are what 
Tommy remembers best of his boyhood. His 
grandmother took in washing, and had a hard 
time keeping the little family going. She was a 
fine, brusque old lady and as Tommy went off 
to school in the mornings she used to frown at 
him from the upstairs window because his hands 
were in his pockets. For as everybody knows, 
only sloudiy good-for-nothings walk to school 
with pocketed hands. 

Tommy did so well in his lessons that he was 
one of the star pupils given the privilege of learn- 
ing an extra language in the evenings. He chose 
English because most of the sailors he met 
talked English, and his great ambition was to be a 



SHANDYGAFF 171 

seaman. His uncle was a quartermaster in the 
Dutch navy, and his father was at sea; and 
Tommy's chance soon came. 

After school hours he used to sell postcards, 
cologne, soap, chocolates, and other knicknacks 
to the sailors, to earn a little cash to help his 
grandmother. One afternoon in the spring of 
1909 he was down on the docks with his little 
packet of wares, when a school friend came 
running to him. 

"Drevis, Drevis!" he shouted, "they want a 
mess-room boy on the Queen Eleanor!'* 

It didn't take Drevis long to get aboard the 
Queen Eleanor, a British tramp out of Glasgow, 
bound for Hamburg and Vladivostok. He accosted 
the chief engineer, his blue eyes shining eagerly. 

"Yes," says the chief, "I need a mess-room 
steward right away — we sail at four o'clock." 

"Try me!" pipes Drevis. (Bless us, the boy 
was barely thirteen !) 

The chief roars with laughter. 

"Too small!" he says. 

Drevis insisted that he was just the boy for 
mess-room steward. 

"Well," says the chief, "go home and put on a 
pair of long pants and come back again. Then 
we'll see how you look!" 

Tommy ran home rejoicing. His Uncle Hen- 



172 SHANDYGAFF 

drick was a small man, and Tommy grabbed a 
pair of his trousers. Thus fortified, he hastened 
back to the Queen Eleanor. The chief cackled, 
but he took him on at two pounds five a month. 

Tommy didn't last long as mess-room boy. 
He broke so many cups the engineers had to 
drink out of dippers, and they degraded him to 
cabin boy at a pound a month. Even as cabin 
boy he was no instant success. He used to forget 
to empty the chief's slop-pail, and the water 
would overflow the cabin. He felt the force of a 
stout sea boot not a few times in learning the 
golden rubric of the tramp steamer's cabin boy. 

"Drevis" was a strange name to the English 
seamen, and they christened him "Tommy/* 
and that handle turns him still. 

Tommy's blue eyes and honest Netherland grin 
and easy temper kept him friendly with all the 
world. The winds of chance sent him scudding 
about the globe, a true casual of the seas. His 
first voyage as A. B. was on the Fernfield in 1911, 
and there he met a certain Scotch engineer. This 
engineer had a habit of being interested in human 
problems, and Tommy's guileless phiz attracted 
him. Under his tutelage Tommy acquired a 
thirst for promotion, and soon climbed to the rank 
of quartermaster. 

One thing that always struck Tommy was the 



SHANDYGAFF 173 

number of books the engineer had in his cabin. 
A volume of Nat Gould, Ouida or "The Duch- 
ess" would be the largest library Tommy would 
have found in the other bunks; but here, before 
his wondering gaze, were Macaulay, Gibbon, 
Gorki, Conrad, Dickens, Zola, Shakespeare, Mon- 
taigne, Chaucer, Shaw, and what not. And 
what would Master Tommy have said had he 
known that his friend, even then, was working 
on a novel in which he, Tommy, would play an 
important role! 

The years went by. On sailing ships, on steam 
tramps, on private yachts, as seaman, as quarter- 
master, as cook's helper, Tommy drifted about 
the world. One day when he was twenty years 
old he was rambling about New York just before 
sailing for Liverpool on the steam yacht Alvina. 
He was one of a strictly neutral crew (the United 
States was still neutral in those days) signed on to 
take a millionaire's pet plaything across the 
wintry ocean. She had been sold to the Russian 
Government (there still was one then!) 

Tommy was passing through the arcade of the 
Pennsylvania Station when his eye fell upon the 
book shop there. He was startled to see in the 
window a picture of the Scotch engineer — his best 
friend, the only man in the world who had ever 
been like a father to him. He knew that the 



174 SHANDYGAFF 

engineer was far away in the Mediterranean, 
working on an English transport. He scanned 
the poster with amazement. 

Apparently his friend had written a book. 
Tommy, like a practical seaman, went to the 
heart of the matter. He went into the shop and 
bought the book. He fell into talk with the book- 
seller, who had read the book. He told the 
bookseller that he had known the author, and 
that for years they had served together on the 
same vessels at sea. He told how the writer, who 
was the former second engineer of the Fernfield, 
had done many things for the little Dutch lad 
whose own father had died at sea. Then came 
another surprise. 

"I believe you're one of the characters in the 
story," said the bookseller. 

It was so. The book was "Casuals of the 
Sea," the author, William McFee, who had been 
a steamship engineer for a dozen years; and 
Drevis Jonkers found himself described in full in 
the novel as "Drevis Noordhof," and playing a 
leading part in the story. Can you imagine the 
simple sailor's surprise and delight? Pleased 
beyond measure, in his soft Dutch accent liberally 
flavoured with cockney he told the bookseller 
how Mr. McFee had befriended him, had urged 
him to go on studying navigation so that he might 



SHANDYGAFF 175 

become an officer; and that though they had not 
met for several years he still receives letters from 
his friend, full of good advice about saving his 
money, where to get cheap lodgings in Brooklyn, 
and not to fall into the common error of sailors 
in thinking that Hoboken and Passayunk Avenue 
are all America. And Tommy went back to his 
yacht chuckling with delight, with a copy of 
"Casuals of the Sea" under his arm. 

Here my share in the adventure begins. The 
bookseller, knowing my interest in the book, 
hastened to tell me the next time I saw him that 
one of the characters in the story was in New 
York. I wrote to Tommy asking him to come to 
see me. He wrote that the Alvina was to sail the 
next day, and he could not get away. I supposed 
the incident was closed. 

Then I saw in the papers that the Alvina had 
been halted in the Narrows by a United States 
destroyer, the Government having suspected that 
her errand was not wholly neutral. Rumour had 
it that she was on her way to the Azores, there to 
take on armament for the house of Romanoff. 
She was halted at the Quarantine Station at 
Staten Island, pending an investigation. 

Then enters the elbow Of coincidence. Looking 
over some books in the very same bookshop where 
Tommy had bought his friend's novel, I over- 



176 SHANDYGAFF 

heard another member of the Alvina's crew asking 
about "Casuals of the Sea." His chum Tommy 
had told him about his adventure, and he, too, 
was there to buy one. (Not every day does one 
meet one's friends walking in a 500-page novel!) 
By the never-to-be-sufficiently-admired hand of 
chance I was standing at Joe Hogan's very elbow 
when he began explaining to the book clerk that 
he was a friend of the Dutch sailor who had been 
there a few days before. 

So a few days later, behold me on the Staten 
Island ferry, on my way to see Tommy and the 
Alvina. 

I'm afraid I would always desert the office if 
there's a plausible excuse to bum about the water- 
front. Is there any passion in the breast of man- 
kind more absorbing than the love of ships? A 
tall Cunarder putting out to sea gives me a keener 
thrill than anything the Polo Grounds or the 
Metropolitan Opera can show. Of what avail a 
meeting of the Authors' League when one can 
know the sights, sounds, and smells of West or 
South Street? I used to lug volumes of Joseph 
Conrad down to the West-Street piers to give them 
to captains and first mates of liners, and get them 
to talk about the ways of the sea. That was how 
I met Captain Claret of the Minnehaha, that 
prince of seamen; and Mr. Pape of the Orduna, 



SHANDYGAFF 177 

Mr. Jones of the Lusitania and many another. 
They knew all about Conrad, too. There were 
five volumes of Conrad in the officers' cabins on the 
Lusitania when she went down, God rest her. I 
know, because I put them there. 

And the Staten Island ferry is a voyage on the 
Seven Seas for the landlubber, After months of 
office work, how one's heart leaps to greet our old 
mother the sea! How drab, flat, and humdrum 
seem the ways of earth in comparison to the hardy 
and austere life of ships! There on every hand 
go the gallant shapes of vessels — the James L. 
Morgan, dour little tug, shoving two barges; 
Themistocles, at anchor, with the blue and white 
Greek colours painted on her rusty flank; the 
Comanche outward bound for Galveston (I think) ; 
the Ascalon, full-rigged ship, with blue-jerseyed 
sailormen out on her bowspirit snugging the can- 
vas. And who is so true a lover of the sea as 
one who can suffer the ultimate indignities — and 
love her still! I am queasy as soon as I sight 
Sandy Hook. . . . 

At the quarantine station I had a surprise. 
The Alvina was not there. One old roustabout 
told me he thought she had gone to sea. I was 
duly taken aback. Had I made the two-hour 
trip for nothing? Then another came to my aid. 



178 SHANDYGAFF 

" There she is, up in the bight," he said. I followed 
his gesture, and saw her — a long, slim white hull, 
a cream-coloured funnel with a graceful rake; 
the Stars and Stripes fresh painted in two places 
on her shining side. I hailed a motor boat to 
take me out. The boatman wanted three dollars, 
and I offered one. He protested that the yacht 
was interned and he had no right to take visitors 
out anyway. He'd get into trouble with "39" — 
"39" being a United States destroyer lying in the 
Narrows a few hundred yards away. After some 
bickering we compromised on a dollar and a quarter. 

That was a startling adventure for the humble 
publisher's reader! Wallowing in an ice-glazed 
motor boat, in the lumpy water of a "bight" — 
surrounded by ships and the men who sail them — I 
might almost have been a hardy newspaper man ! 
But Long Island commuters are nurtured to a 
tough and perilous life, and I clambered the 
Alvina's side without dropping hat, stick, or any 
of my pocketful of manuscripts. 

Joe Hogan, the steward, was there in his white 
jacket. He introduced me to the cook, the bosun, 
the "chief," the wireless, and the "second." The 
first officer was too heavy with liquor to notice the 
arrival of a stranger. Messrs. Haig and Haig, 
those Dioscuri of seamen, had been at work. The 
skipper was ashore. He keeps a saloon. 



SHANDYGAFF 179 

The Alvina is a lovely little vessel, 215 feet long, 
they told me, and about 525 tons. She is fitted 
with mahogany throughout; the staterooms all 
have brass double beds and private bathrooms 
attached; she has her own wireless telegraph and 
telephone, refrigerating apparatus, and everything 
to make the owner and his guests comfortable. 
But her beautiful furnishings were tumbled this 
way and that in preparation for the sterner duties 
that lay before her. The lower deck was cum- 
bered with sacks of coal lashed down. A trans- 
atlantic voyage in January is likely to be a lively 
one for a yacht of 500 tons. 

I found Tommy below in his bunk, cleaning up. 
He is a typical Dutch lad — round, open face, fair 
hair, and guileless blue eyes. He showed me all his 
treasures — his certificates of good conduct from all 
the ships (both sail and steam) on which he has 
served; a picture of his mother, who died when he 
was six; and of his sister Greta — a very pretty girl 
— who is also mentioned in Casuals of the Sea. 
The drunken fireman in the story who dies after a 
debauch was Tommy's father who died in the same 
way. And with these other treasures Tommy 
showed me a packet of letters from Mr. McFee. 

I do not want to offend Mr. McFee by describ- 
ing his letters to this Dutch sailor-boy as "sen- 



180 SHANDYGAFF 

sible," but that is just what they were. Tommy 
is one of his own "casuals" — 

— those frail craft upon the restless Sea 
Of Human Life, who strike the rocks uncharted, 
Who loom, sad phantoms, near us, drearily, 
Storm-driven, rudderless, with timbers started — 

and these sailormen who drift from port to port on 
the winds of chance are most in need of sound 
Ben Franklin advice. Save your money; put 
it in the bank; read books; go to see the museums, 
libraries, and art galleries; get to know something 
about this great America if you intend to settle 
down there — that is the kind of word Tommy gets 
from his friend. 

Gradually, as I talked with him, I began to see 
into the laboratory of life where "Casuals of the 
Sea" originated. This book is valuable because 
it is a triumphant expression of the haphazard, 
strangely woven chances that govern the lives of 
the humble. In Tommy's honest, gentle face, and 
in the talk of his shipmates when we sat down to 
dinner together, I saw a microcosm of the strange 
barren life of the sea where men float about for 
years like driftwood. And out of all this ebbing 
tide of aimless, happy-go-lucky humanity McFee 
had chanced upon this boy from Amsterdam and 
had tried to pound into him some good sound 
common sense. 



SHANDYGAFF 181 ; 

When I left her that afternoon, the Alvina was 
getting up steam, and she sailed within a few 
hours. I had eaten and talked with her crew, 
and for a short space had a glimpse of the lives 
and thoughts of the simple, childlike men who 
live on ships. I realized for the first time the 
truth of that background of aimless hazard that 
makes "Casuals of the Sea" a book of more than 
passing merit. 

As for Tommy, the printed word had him in 
thrall though he knew it not. When he got back 
from Liverpool, two months later, I found him a 
job in the engine room of a big printing press. 
He was set to work oiling the dynamos, and at 
ten dollars a week he had a fine chance to work his 
way up. Indeed, he enrolled in a Scranton cor- 
respondence course on steam engineering and 
enchanted his Hempstead landlady by his simple 
ways. That lasted just two weeks. The level 
ground made Tommy's feet uneasy. The last I 
heard he was on a steam yacht on Long Island 
Sound. 

But wherever steam and tide may carry him, 
Tommy cherishes in his heart his own private 
badge of honour: his friend the engineer has put 
him in a book! And there, in one of the noblest 
and most honest novels of our day, you will find 
him — a casual of the sea! 



THE LAST PIPE 

The last smoker I recollect among those of the old school 
was a clergyman. He had seen the best society, and was 
a man of the most polished behaviour. This did not hinder 
him from taking his pipe every evening before he went 
to bed. He sat in his armchair., his back gently bending, 
his knees a little apart, his eyes placidly inclined toward the 
fire. The end of his recreation was announced by the 
tapping of the bowl of his pipe upon the hob, for the purpose 
of emptying it of its ashes. Ashes to ashes; head to bed. 

— Leigh Hunt. 

THE sensible man smokes (say) sixteen 
pipefuls a day, and all differ in value and 
satisfaction. In smoking there is, thank 
heaven, no law of diminishing returns. I may 
puff all day long until I nigresce with the fumes 
and soot, but the joy loses no savour by repetition. 
It is true that there is a peculiar blithe rich taste in 
the first morning puffs, inhaled after breakfast. 
(Let me posit here the ideal conditions for a morn- 
ing pipe as I know them.) After your bath, 
breakfast must be spread in a chamber of eastern 
exposure; let there be hominy and cream, and if 
possible, brown sugar. There follow scrambled 

182 



SHANDYGAFF 183 

eggs, shirred to a lemon-yellow, with toast sliced 
in triangles, fresh, unsalted butter, and Scotch 
bitter marmalade. Let there be without fail 
a platter of hot bacon, curly, juicy, fried to the 
debatable point where softness is overlaid with 
the faintest crepitation of crackle, of crispyness. 
If hot Virginia corn pone is handy, so much the 
better. And coffee, two-thirds hot milk, also 
with brown sugar. It must be permissible to call 
for a second serving of the scrambled eggs; or, 
if this is beyond the budget, let there be a round 
of judiciously grilled kidneys, with mayhap a 
sprinkle of mushrooms, grown in chalky soil. 
That is the kind of breakfast they used to serve 
in Eden before the fall of man and the invention 
of innkeepers with their crass formulae. 

After such a breakfast, if one may descend into 
a garden of plain turf, mured about by an occlud- 
ing wall, with an alley of lime trees for sober 
pacing: then and there is the fit time and place 
for the first pipe of the day. Pack your mixture 
in the bowl; press it lovingly down with the 
cushion of the thumb; see that the draught is 
free — and then for your sackerhets tdndstickor ! 
A day so begun is well begun, and sin will flee 
your precinct. Shog, vile care! The smoke is 
cool and blue and tasty on the tongue; the arch 
of the palate is receptive to the fume; the curling 



184 SHANDYGAFF 

vapour ascends the chimneys of the nose. Fill 
your cheeks with the excellent cloudy reek, blow 
it forth in twists and twirls. The first pipe! 

But, as I was saying, joy ends not here. 
Granted that the after-breakfast smoke excels 
in savour, succeeding fumations grow in mental 
reaction. The first pipe is animal, physical, a 
matter of pure sensation. With later kindlings of 
the weed the brain quickens, begins to throw out 
tendrils of speculation, leaps to welcome problems 
for thought, burrows tingling into the unknow- 
able. As the smoke drifts and shreds about your 
neb, your mind is surcharged with that impon- 
derable energy of thought, which cannot be seen 
or measured, yet is the most potent force in 
existence. All the hot sunlight of Virginia that 
stirred the growing leaf in its odorous plantation 
now crackles in that glowing dottel in your briar 
bowl. The venomous juices of the stalk seep 
down the stem. The most precious things in the 
world are also vivid with poison. 

Was Kant a smoker? I think he must have 
been. How else could he have written " The Criti- 
que of Pure Reason" ? Tobacco is the handmaid of 
science, philosophy, and literature. Carlyle eased 
his indigestion and snappish temper by perpetual 
pipes. The generous use of the weed makes the 
enforced retirement of Sing Sing less irksome to 



SHANDYGAFF 185 

forgers, second-story men, and fire bugs. Samuel 
Butler, who had little enough truck with church- 
men, was once invited to stay a week-end by the 
Bishop of London. Distrusting the entertaining 
qualities of bishops, and rightly, his first impulse 
Was to decline. But before answering the Bishop's 
letter he passed it to his manservant for advice. 
The latter (the immortal Alfred Emery Cathie) 
said: "There is a crumb of tobacco in the fold of 
the paper, sir: I think you may safely go." He 
went, and hugely enjoyed himself. 

There is a Bible for smokers, a book of delight- 
ful information for all acolytes of this genial ritual, 
crammed with wit and wisdom upon the art and 
mystery we cherish. It is called "The Social 
History of Smoking," by G. L. Apperson. Alas, 
a friend of mine, John Marshall (he lives some- 
where in Montreal or Quebec), borrowed it from 
me, and obstinately declines to return it. If he 
should ever see this, may his heart be loosened 
and relent. Dear John, I wish you would return 
that book. (Canadian journals please copy!) 

I was contending that the joy of smoking in- 
creases harmonically with the weight of tobacco 
consumed, within reasonable limits. Of course 
the incessant smoker who is puffing all day long 
sears his tongue and grows callous to the true 



186 SHANDYGAFF 

delicacy of the flavour. For that reason it is best 
not to smoke during office hours. This may be a 
hard saying to some, but a proper respect for the 
art impels it. Not even the highest ecclesiast 
can be at his devotions always. It is not those 
who are horny with genuflection who are nearest 
the Throne of Grace. Even the Pope ( .1 speak in 
all reverence) must play billiards or trip a coranto 
now and then! 

This is the schedule I vouch for: 

After breakfast: 2 pipes 

At luncheon: 2 pipes 

Before dinner: 2 pipes 

Between dinner and bed* 10 to 12 pipes 

(Cigars and cigarettes as occasion may require.) 

The matter of smoking after dinner requires con- 
sideration. If your meal is a heavy, stupefying 
anodyne, retracting all the humane energies from 
the skull in a forced abdominal mobilization to 
quell a plethora of food into subjection and 
assimilation, there is no power of speculation left 
in the top storeys. You sink brutishly into an 
armchair, warm your legs at the fire, and let the 
leucocytes and phagocytes fight it out. At such 
times smoking becomes purely mechanical. You 
imbibe and exhale the fumes automatically. The 
choicest aromatic blends are mere fuel. Your 



SHANDYGAFF 187 

eyes see, but your brain responds not. The 
vital juices, generous currents, or whatever they 
are that animate the intelligence, are down below 
hatches fighting furiously to annex and drill into 
submission the alien and distracting mass of food 
that you have taken on board. They are like 
stevedores, stowing the cargo for portability. 
A little later, however, when this excellent 
work is accomplished, the bosun may trill his 
whistle, and the deck hands can be summoned 
back to the navigating bridge. The mind casts 
off its corporeal hawsers and puts out to sea. You 
begin once more to live as a rational composition 
of reason, emotion, and will. The heavy dinner 
postpones and stultifies this desirable state. Let 
it then be said that light dining is best: a little 
fish or cutlets, white wine, macaroni and cheese, 
ice cream and coffee. Such a regime restores the 
animal health, and puts you in vein for a con- 
tinuance of intellect. 

Smoking is properly an intellectual exercise. 
It calls forth the choicest qualities of mind and 
soul. It can only be properly conducted by a 
being in full possession of the five wits. For 
those who are in pain, sorrow, or grievous per- 
plexity it operates as a sovereign consoler, a balm 
and balsam to the harassed spirit; it calms the 
fretful, makes jovial the peevish. Better than 



188 SHANDYGAFF 

any ginseng in the herbal, does it combat fatigue 
and old age. Well did Stevenson exhort virgins not 
to marry men who do not smoke. 

Now we approach the crux and pinnacle of this 
inquirendo into the art and mystery of smoking. 
That is to say, the last pipe of all before the so- 
long indomitable intellect abdicates, and the body 
succumbs to weariness. 

No man of my acquaintance has ever given me 
a satisfactory definition of living. An alternating 
systole and diastole, says physiology. Chlor- 
ophyl becoming xanthophyl, says botany. These 
stir me not. I define life as a process of the Will- 
to-Smoke: recurring periods of consciousness in 
which the enjoyability of smoking is manifest, in- 
terrupted by intervals of recuperation. 

Now if I represent the course of this process by 
a graph (the co-ordinates being Time and the 
Sense-of-by-the-Smoker-enjoyed-Satisfaction) the 
curve ascends from its origin in a steep slant, 
then drops away abruptly at the recuperation in- 
terval. This is merely a teutonic and pedantic 
mode of saying that the best pipe of all is the last 
one smoked at night. It is the penultimate mo- 
ment that is always the happiest. The sweetest 
pipe ever enjoyed by the skipper of the Hesperus 
was the one he whiffed just before he was tirpitzed 
by the poet on that angry reef. 



SHANDYGAFF 189 

The best smoking I ever do is about half past 
midnight, just before "my eyelids drop their 
shade," to remind you again of your primary 
school poets. After the toils, rebuffs, and exhila- 
rations of the day, after piaffing busily on the 
lethal typewriter or schreibmaschine for some 
hours, a drowsy languor begins to numb the 
sense. In dressing gown and slippers I seek my 
couch; Ho, Lucius, a taper! and some solid, invig- 
orating book for consideration. My favourite is 
the General Catalogue of the Oxford University 
Press: a work so excellently full of learning; printed 
and bound with such eminence of skill; so noble a 
repository or Thesaurus of the accumulated 
treasures of human learning, that it sets the 
mind in a glow of wonder. This is the choicest 
garland for the brain fatigued with the insigni- 
ficant and trifling tricks by which we earn our 
daily bread. There is no recreation so lovely as 
that afforded by books rich in wisdom and ribbed 
with ripe and sober research. This catalogue 
(nearly 600 pages) is a marvellous precis of the 
works of the human spirit. And here and there, 
buried in a scholarly paragraph, one meets a 
topical echo : " The Oxford Shakespeare Glos- 
sary: by C. T. Onions: Mr. Onions' glossary, 
offered at an insignificant price, relieves English 
scholarship of the necessity of recourse to the lexi- 



190 SHANDYGAFF 

con of Schmidt." Lo, how do even professors 
and privat-docents belabour one another! 

With due care I fill, pack, and light the last pipe 
of the day, to be smoked reverently and solemnly 
in bed. The thousand brain-murdering inter- 
ruptions are over. The gentle sibilance of air 
drawn through the glowing nest of tobacco is the 
only sound. With reposeful heart I turn to some 
favourite entry in my well-loved catalogue. 

"Henry Peacham's Compleat Gentleman. 
Fashioning him absolut in the most necessary 
and Commendable Qualities concerning Minde, 
or Body, that may be required in a Noble Gentle- 
man. Wherunto is annexed a Description of 
the order of a Maine Battaile or Pitched Field, 
eight severall wayes, with the Art of Limming and 
other Additions newly Enlarged. Printed from 
the edition of 1634; first edition, 1622, with an 
introduction by G. S. Gordon. 1906. Pp xxiv 
+ 16 unpaged + 262. 7s. 6d. net. At the Clarendon 
Press." 

Or this: 

"H. His Devises, for his owne exercise, and his 
Friends pleasure. Printed from the edition of 
1581, with an introduction. 1906. Pp xviii 
+ 104. 5s. net." 

O excellent H! Little did he dream that his 
devises (with an introduction by Professor Sir 



SHANDYGAFF 191 

Walter Raleigh) would be still giving his Friends 
pleasure over three hundred years later. The 
compiler of the catalogue says here with modest 
and pardonable pride "strongly bound in excep- 
tionally tough paper and more than once described 
by reviewers as leather. Some of the books are 
here printed for the first time, the rest are repro- 
ductions of the original editions, many having 
prefaces by good hands." 

One o'clock is about to chime in the near-by 
steeple, but my pipe and curiosity are now both 
going strong. 

"The Cures of the Diseased in remote 
Regions, preventing Mortalitie incident in For- 
raine Attempts of the English Nation. 1598. 
The earliest English treatise on tropical diseases. 
1915. Is. 6d. net." 

Is that not the most interesting comment on 
the English colonial enterprises in Elizabeth's 
reign? And there is no limit to the joys of this 
marvellous catalogue. How one dreams of the 
unknown delights of "Two Fifteenth-Century 
Cookery Books," or "Dan Michel's Ayenbite of 
Inwyt, 1340" (which means, as I figure it, the 
"Backbite of Conscience"), or "Origenis Hex- 
aplorum quae supersunt sive Veterum Interpre- 
tum Graecorum in totum Vetus Testamentum 
Fragmenta, edidit F. Field. 1865. Two volumes 



192 SHANDYGAFF 

£6 6s. net" or " Shuckf ord's Sacred and Profane 
History of the World, from the Creation of the 
World to the Dissolution of the Assyrian Empire 
at the death of Sardanapalus, and to the Declen- 
sion of The Kingdom of Judah and Israel under the 
Reigns of Ahaz and Pekah, with the Creation 
and Fall of Man. 1728, reprinted 1848. Pp 550. 
10s. net." 

But I dare not force my hobbies on you further. 
One man's meat is another's caviar. I dare not 
even tell you what my favourite tobaccos are, for 
recently when I sold to a magazine a very worthy 
and excellent poem entitled "My Pipe," mention- 
ing the brands I delight to honour, the editor made 
me substitute fictitious names for my dearly loved 
blends. He said that sound editorial policy for- 
bids mentioning commercial products in the text 
of the magazine. 

But tobacco, thank heaven, is not merely a 
"commercial product." Let us call on Salvation 
Yeo for his immortal testimony: 

"When all things were made none was made 
better than this; to be a lone man's companion, a 
bachelor's friend, a hungry man's food, a sad man's 
cordial, a wakeful man's sleep, and a chilly man's 
fire, sir; while for stanching of wounds, purging of 
rheum, and settling of the stomach, there's no 
herb like unto it under the canopy of heaven." 



SHANDYGAFF 193 

And by this time the bowl is naught but ash. 
Even my dear General Catalogue begins to blur 
before me. Slip it under the pillow; gently and 
kindly lay the pipe in the candlestick, and blow 
out the flame. The window is open wide: the 
night rushes in. I see a glimpse of stars . . . 
a distant chime . . . and fall asleep with 
the faint pungence of the Indian herb about me. 



TIME TO LIGHT THE FURNACE 

THE twenty-eighth of October. Coal 
nine dollars a ton. Mr. and Mrs. Black- 
well had made a resolution not to start 
the furnace until Thanksgiving. And in the 
biting winds of Long Island that requires courage. 
Commuters the world over are a hardy, valor- 
ous race. The Arab commutes by dromedary, 
the Malay by raft, the Indian rajah by elephant, 
the African chief gets a team of his mothers-in- 
law to tow him to the office. But wherever you 
find him, the commuter is a tough and tempered 
soul, inured to privation and calamity. At 
seven-thirty in the morning he leaves his bunga- 
low, tent, hut, palace, or kraal, and tells his wife 
he is going to work. 

How the winds whistle and moan over those 
Long Island flats! Mr. and Mrs. Blackwell had 
laid in fifteen tons of black diamonds. And 
hoping that would be enough, they were zealous 
not to start the furnace until the last touchdown 
had been made. 

But every problem has more than one aspect. 
Belinda, the new cook, had begun to work for 

194 



SHANDYGAFF 195 

them on the fifth of October. Belinda came 
from the West Indies, a brown maiden still un- 
spoiled by the sophistries of the employment 
agencies. She could boil an egg without crack- 
ing it, she could open a tin can without maiming 
herself. She was neat, guileless, and cheerful. 
But, she was accustomed to a warm climate. 

The twenty-eighth of October. As Mr. and 
Mrs. Blackwell sat at dinner, Mr. Blackwell 
buttoned his coat, and began a remark about how 
chilly the evenings were growing. But across the 
table came one of those glances familiar to indis- 
creet husbands. Passion distorted, vibrant with 
rebuke, charged with the lightning of instant 
dissolution, Mrs. Blackwell's gaze struck him 
dumb with alarm. Husbands, husbands, you 
know that gaze! 

Mr. Blackwell kept silence. He ate heartily, 
choosing foods rich in calories. He talked of other 
matters, and accepted thankfully what Belinda 
brought to him. But he was chilly, and a vision 
of coal bills danced in his mind. 

After dinner he lit the open fire in the living 
room, and he and Mrs. Blackwell talked in dis- 
creet tones. Belinda was merrily engaged in wash- 
ing the dishes. 

"Bob, you consummate blockhead!" said Mrs. 



196 SHANDYGAFF 

Blackwell, "haven't you better sense than to 
talk about its being chilly? These last few days 
Belinda has done nothing but complain about the 
cold. She comes from Barbados, where the ther- 
mometer never goes below sixty. She said she 
couldn't sleep last night, her room was so cold. 
I've given her my old fur coat and the steamer 
rug from your den. One other remark like that 
of yours and she'll leave. For heaven's sake, 
Bob, use your skull!" 

Mr. Blackwell gazed at her in concern. The 
deep, calculating wisdom of women was made 
plain to him. He ventured no reply. 

Mrs. Blackwell was somewhat softened by his 
docility. 

"You don't realize, dear," she added, "how 
servants are affected by chance remarks they 
overhear. The other day you mentioned the 
thermometer, and the next morning I found 
Belinda looking at it. If you must say anything 
about the temperature, complain of the heat. 
Otherwise we'll have to start the furnace at 
once." 

Mr. Blackwell 's face was full of the admira- 
tion common to the simple-minded race of hus- 
bands. 

"Jumbo," he said, "you're right. I was 
crazy. Watch me from now on. Mental sug- 



SHANDYGAFF 197 

gestion is the dope. The power of the chance 
remark!" 

The next evening at dinner, while Belinda was 
passing the soup, Mr. Blackwell fired his first gun. 
"It seems almost too warm for hot soup," he 
said. "All the men at the office were talking 
about the unseasonable hot weather. I think 
we'd better have a window open." To Mrs. 
Blackwell 's dismay, he raised one of the dining- 
room windows, admitting a pungent frostiness 
of October evening. But she was game, and 
presently called for a palm-leaf fan. When 
Belinda was in the room they talked pointedly of 
the heat, and Mr. Blackwell quoted imaginary 
Weather Bureau notes from the evening paper. 

After dinner, as he was about to light the log 
fire, from force of habit, Mrs. Blackwell snatched 
the burning match from him just as he was set- 
ting it to the kindling. They grinned at each 
other wistfully, for the ruddy evening blaze was 
their chief delight. Mr. Blackwell manfully took 
off his coat and waistcoat and sat in his shirt- 
sleeves until Belinda had gone to bed. Then 
he grew reckless and lit a roaring fire, by which 
they huddled in glee. He rebuilt the fire before 
retiring, so that Belinda might suspect nothing 
in the morning. 

The next evening Mr. Blackwell appeared at 



198 SHANDYGAFF 

dinner in a Palm Beach suit. Mrs. Blackwell 
countered by ordering iced tea. They both 
sneezed vigorously during the meal. "It was so 
warm in town to-day, I think I caught a cold," 
said Mr. Blackwell. 

Later Mrs. Blackwell found Belinda examin- 
ing the thermometer with a puzzled air. That 
night they took it down and hid it in the attic. 
But the great stroke of the day was revealed when 
Mrs. Blackwell explained that Mr. and Mrs. 
Chester, next door, had promised to carry on a 
similar psychological campaign. Belinda and 
Mrs. Chester's cook, Tulip — jocularly known as 
the Black Tulip — were friends, and would undoubt- 
edly compare notes. Mrs. Chester had agreed 
not to start her furnace without consultation with 
Mrs. Blackwell. 

October yielded to November. By good for- 
tune the weather remained sunny, but the nights 
were crisp. Belinda was given an oil-stove for 
her attic bedroom. Mrs. Blackwell heard no 
more complaints of the cold, but sometimes she 
and her husband could hear uneasy creakings 
upstairs late at night. "I wonder if Barbados 
really is so warm?" she asked Bob. "I'm sure 
it can't be warmer than Belinda's room. She 
never opens the windows, and the oil-stove has 
to be filled every morning." 



SHANDYGAFF 199 

"Perhaps some day we can get an Eskimo maid," 
suggested Mr. Blackwell drowsily. He wore 
his Palm Beach suit every night for dinner, but 
underneath it he was panoplied in heavy flannels. 

Through Mr. Chester the rumour of the Black- 
wells' experiment in psychology spread far among 
suburban husbands. On the morning train less 
fortunate commuters, who had already started 
their fires, referred to him as "the little brother 
of the iceberg." Mr. and Mrs. Chester came to 
dinner on the 16th of November. Both the men 
loudly clamoured for permission to remove their 
coats, and sat with blanched and chattering 
jaws. Mr. Blackwell made a feeble pretence at 
mopping his brow, but when the dessert proved 
to be ice-cream his nerve forsook him. "N-no, 
Belinda," he said. "It's too warm for ice-cream 
to-night. I don't w — want to get chilled. Bring 
me some hot coffee." As she brought his cup he 
noticed that her honest brown brow was beaded 
with perspiration. "By George," he thought, 
"this mental suggestion business certainly works." 
Late that evening he lit the log fire and revelled 
by the blaze in an ulster. 

The next evening when Mr. Blackwell came 
home from business he met the doctor in the hall. 

"Hello, doc," he said, "what's up?" 



200 SHANDYGAFF 

"Mrs. Blackwell called me in to see your 
maid," said the doctor. "It's the queerest thing 
I've met in twenty years' practice. Here it is 
the 17th of November, and cold enough for snow. 
That girl has all the symptoms of sunstroke and 
prickly heat." 



MY FRIEND 

TO-DAY we called each other by our 
given names for the first time. 
Making a new friend is so exhilarating 
an adventure that perhaps it will not be out of 
place if I tell you a little about him. There are 
not many of his kind. 

In the first place, he is stout, like myself. We 
are both agreed that many of the defects of 
American letters to-day are due to the sorry 
leanness of our writing men. We have no Ches- 
tertons, no Bellocs. I look to Don Marquis, to 
H. L. Mencken, to Heywood Broun, to Clayton 
Hamilton, and to my friend here portraited, to 
remedy this. If only Mr. Simeon Strunsky were 
stouter! He is plump, but not yet properly cor- 
pulent. 

My friend is a literary journalist. There are 
but few of them in these parts. Force of circum- 
stances may compel him to write of trivial things, 
but it would be impossible for him not to write 
with beauty and distinction far above his theme. 
His style is a perfect echo of his person, mellow, 
quaint, and richly original. To plunder a phrase of 
201 



202 SHANDYGAFF 

his own, it is drenched with the sounds, the scents, 
the colours, of great literature. 

I, too, am employed in a bypath of the publish- 
ing business, and try to bring to my tasks some 
small measure of honest idealism. But what I 
love (I use this great word with care) in my friend 
is that his zeal for beauty and for truth is great 
enough to outweigh utterly the paltry considera- 
tions of expediency and comfort which sway most 
of us. To him his pen is as sacred as the scalpel to 
the surgeon. He would rather die than dishonour 
that chosen instrument. 

I hope I am not merely fanciful: but the case 
of my friend has taken in my mind a large import- 
ance quite beyond the exigencies of his personal 
situation. I see in him personified the rising 
generation of literary critics, who have a hard 
row to hoe in a deliterated democracy. By some 
unknowable miracle of birth or training he has 
come by a love of beauty, a reverence for what is 
fine and true, an absolute intolerance of the slip- 
shod and insincere. 

Such a man is not happy, can never be happy, 
when the course of his daily routine wishes him 
to praise what he does not admire, to exploit what 
he does not respect. The most of us have some 
way of quibbling ourselves out of this dilemma. 
But he cannot do so, because more than comfort, 



SHANDYGAFF 203 

more than clothes and shoe leather, more than 
wife or fireside, he must preserve the critic's 
self-respect. "I cannot write a publicity story 
about A. B," he said woefully to me, "because 
I am convinced he is a bogus philosopher. I am 
not interested in selling books : what I have to do 
with is that strange and esoteric thing called 
literature." 

I would be sorry to have it thought that be- 
cause of this devotion to high things my friend is 
stubborn, dogmatic, or hard to work with. He 
is unpractical as dogs, children, or Dr. Johnson; 
in absent-minded simplicity he has issued forth 
upon the highway only half-clad, and been haled 
back to his boudoir by indignant bluecoats; 
but in all matters where absolute devotion to truth 
and honour are concerned I would not find him 
lacking.' Wherever a love of beauty and a rip- 
ened judgment of men and books are a business 
asset, he is a successful business man. 

In person, he has the charm of a monstrously 
overgrown elf. His shyly wandering gaze behind 
thick spectacle panes, his incessant devotion to 
cigarettes and domestic lager, his whimsical talk 
on topics that confound the unlettered — these 
are amiable trifles that endear him to those who 
understand. 

Actually, in a hemisphere bestridden by the 



204 SHANDYGAFF 

crass worship of comfort and ease, here is a man 
whose ideal is to write essays in resounding Eng- 
lish, and to spread a little wider his love of the 
niceties of fine prose. 

I have anatomized him but crudely. If you 
want to catch him in a weak spot, try him on 
Belloc. Hear him rumble his favourite couplet: 

And the men who were boys when I was a boy 
Shall sit and drink with me. 

Indeed let us hope that they will. 



A POET OF SAD VIGILS 

THERE are many ways of sitting down to 
an evening vigil. Unquestionably the 
pleasantest is to fortify the soul with a 
pot of tea, plenty of tobacco, and a few chapters 
of Jane Austen. And if the adorable Miss Austen 
is not to hand, my second choice perhaps would 
be the literary remains of a sad, poor, and 
forgotten young man who was a contemporary of 
hers. 

I say "forgotten," and I think it is just; save 
for his beautiful hymn "The Star of Bethlehem," 
who nowadays ever hears of Henry Kirke White? 
But on the drawing-room tables of our grand- 
mothers' girlhood the plump volume, edited with 
a fulsome memoir by Southey, held honourable 
place near the conch shell from the Pacific and 
the souvenirs of the Crystal Palace. Mr. Southey, 
in his thirty years' laureateship, made the fame of 
several young versifiers, and deemed that in intro- 
ducing poor White's remains to the polite world 
he was laying the first lucifer to a bonfire that 
would gloriously crackle for posterity. No less 
than Chatterton was the worthy laureate's esti- 

£05 



206 SHANDYGAFF 

mate of his young foundling; but alas! Chatterton 
and Kirke White both seem thinnish gruel to us; 
and even Southey himself is down among the pinch 
hitters. Literary prognosis is a parlous sport. 

The generation that gave us Wordsworth, 
Scott, Coleridge, Lamb, Jane Austen, Hazlitt, 
De Quincey, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, leaves us 
little time for Kirke White considered purely as a 
literary man. His verses are grotesquely stilted, 
the obvious conjunction of biliousness and over- 
study, and adapted to the taste of an era when 
the word female was still used as a substantive. 
But they are highly entertaining to read because 
they so faithfully mirror the backwash of roman- 
ticism. They are so thoroughly unhealthy, so 
morbid, so pallid with moonlight, so indentured 
by the ayenbite of inwit, that it is hard to believe 
that Henry's father was a butcher and should pre- 
sumably have reared him on plenty of sound beef- 
steak and blood gravy. If only Miss Julia Lath- 
rop or Dr. Anna Howard Shaw could have been 
Henry's mother, he might have lived to write 
poems on the abolition of slavery in America. 
But as a matter of fact, he was done to death by 
the brutal tutors of St. John's College, Cam- 
bridge, and perished at the age of twenty-one, in 
1806. As a poet, let him pass; but the story of 
his life breathes a sweet and honourable fragrance, 



SHANDYGAFF 207 

and is comely to ponder in the midnight hours. 
As Southey said, there is nothing to be recorded 
but what is honourable to him; nothing to be 
regretted but that one so ripe for heaven should so 
soon have been removed from the world. 

He was born in Nottingham, March 21, 1785, 
of honest tradesman parents; his origin reminds 
one inevitably of that of Keats. From his earliest 
years he was studious in temper, and could with 
difficulty be drawn from his books, even at meal- 
times. At the age of seven he wrote a story of a 
Swiss emigrant and gave it to the servant, being 
too bashful to show it to his mother. Southey 's 
comment on this is "The consciousness of genius 
is always accompanied with this diffidence; it is a 
sacred, solitary feeling." 

His schooling was not long; and while it lasted 
part of Henry's time was employed in carrying his 
father's deliveries of chops and rumps to the pros- 
perous of Nottingham. At fourteen his parents 
made an effort to start him in line for business 
by placing him in a stocking factory. The work 
was wholly uncongenial, and shortly afterward 
he was employed in the office of a busy firm of 
lawyers. He spent twelve hours a day in the office 
and then an hour more in the evening was put upon 
Latin and Greek. Even such recreation hours as 
the miserable youth found were dismally employed 



208 SHANDYGAFF 

in declining nouns and conjugating verbs. In a 
little garret at the top of the house he began to 
collect his books; even his supper of bread and 
milk was carried up to him there, for he refused 
to eat with his family for fear of interrupting his 
studies. It is a deplorable picture: the fumes of 
the hearty butcher's evening meal ascend the stair 
in vain, Henry is reading "Blackstone" and "The 
Wealth of Nations." If it were Udolpho or Conan 
Doyle that held him, there were some excuse. 
The sad life of Henry is the truest indictment of 
overstudy that I know. No one, after reading 
Southey's memoir, will overload his brain again. 

At the age of fifteen we find the boy writing to 
his older brother Neville: "I have made a firm 
resolution never to spend above one hour at this 
amusement [novel reading]. I have been obliged 
to enter into this resolution in consequence of a 
vitiated taste acquired by reading romances." 
He is human enough to add, however, that "after 
long and fatiguing researches in * Blackstone' 
or 'Coke,' 'Tom Jones' or 'Robinson Crusoe' 
afford a pleasing and necessary relaxation. Of 
'Robinson Crusoe' I shall observe that it is 
allowed to be the best novel for youth in the 
English language." 

The older brother to whom these comments 
were addressed was living in London, apparently a 



SHANDYGAFF 209 

fairly successful man of business. Henry per- 
mitted himself to indulge his pedagogical and 
ministerial instincts for the benefit and improve- 
ment of his kinsman. They seem to have carried 
on a mutual recrimination in their letters: 
Neville was inclined to belittle the divine calling 
of poets in their teens; while Henry deplored his 
brother's unwillingness to write at length and 
upon serious and " instructive" topics. Alas, the 
ill-starred young man had a mania for self -improve- 
ment. If our great-grandparents were all like that 
what an age it had been for the Scranton corres- 
pondence courses! "What is requisite to make 
one's correspondence valuable?" asks Henry. "I 
answer, sound sense." (The italics are his own.) 
"You have better natural abilities than many 
youth," he tells his light-hearted brother, "but 
it is with regret I see that you will not give your- 
self the trouble of writing a good letter. My 
friend, you never found any art, however trivial, 
that did not require some application at first." 
He begs the astounded Neville to fill his letters 
with his opinions of the books he reads. "You 
have no idea how beneficial this would be to 
yourself." Does one not know immediately that 
Henry is destined to an early grave? 

Henry's native sweetness was further impaired 
by a number of prizes won in magazine compe- 



210 SHANDYGAFF 

titions. A silver medal and a pair of twelve-inch 
gloves shortly became his for meritorious con- 
tributions to the Monthly Mirror. He was also 
admitted a member of a famous literary society 
then existing in Nottingham, an)d although the 
youngest of the sodality he promptly announced 
that he proposed to deliver them a lecture. With 
mingled curiosity and dismay the gathering 
assembled at the appointed time, and the in- 
spired youth harangued them for two hours on 
the subject of Genius. The devil, or his agent 
in Nottingham, had marked Henry for de- 
struction. 

In such a career there can be no doubt as to 
the next step. He published a book of poems. 
His verses, dealing with such topics as Consump- 
tion, Despair, Lullaby of a Female Convict to Her 
Child the Night Previous to Execution, Lines 
Spoken by a Lover at the Grave of His Mistress, 
The Eve of Death, and Sonnet Addressed by a 
Female Limatic to a Lady, had been warmly wel- 
comed by the politest magazines of the time. 
To wish to publish them in more permanent 
form was natural; but the unfortunate young 
man conceived the thought that the venture 
might even be a profitable one. He had found 
himself troubled with deafness, which threatened 
to annul his industry in the law; moreover, his 



SHANDYGAFF -211 

spirit was canting seriously toward devotional 
matters, and thoughts of a college career and then 
the church were lively in his mind. 

The winter of 1802-3 was busily passed in pre- 
paring his manuscript for the printer. Probably 
never before or since, until the Rev. John Frank- 
lin Bair of Greensburg, Pennsylvania, set about 
garnering his collected works into that volume 
which is the delight of the wicked, has a human 
heart mulled over indifferent verses with so 
honest a pleasure and such unabated certainty 
of immortality. The first two details to be at- 
tended to were the printing of what were modestly 
termed Proposals — i. e., advertisements of the 
projected volume, calling for pledges of sub- 
scription — and, still more important, securing 
the permission of some prominent person to 
accept a dedication of the book. The jolly old 
days of literary patronage were then in the sere 
and saffron, but it was still esteemed an aid to the 
sale of a volume if it might be dedicated to some 
marquis of Carabas. Accordingly the manu- 
script was despatched to London, and Neville, 
the philistine brother, was called upon to leave it 
at the residence of the Duchess of Devonshire. 
A very humble letter from honest Henry accom- 
panied it, begging leave of her Grace to dedicate 
his "trifling effusions" to her. 



212 SHANDYGAFF 

Henry's letters to Neville while his book was 
in preparation are very entertaining, as those of 
minor poets always are under such circumstan- 
ces. Henry was convinced that at least 350 copies 
would be sold in Nottingham. He writes in 
exultation that he has already got twenty-three 
orders even before his "proposals" are ready: 

"I have got twenty- three, without making the 
affair public at all, among my immediate acquain- 
tance: and mind, I neither solicit nor draw the 
conversation to the subject, but a rumour has 
got abroad, and has been received more favour- 
ably than I expected." 

But the matter of the dedication unfortunately 
lagged far behind the poet's hopes. After the 
manuscript was left at the house of her Grace of 
Devonshire there followed what the Ancient 
Mariner so feelingly calls a weary time. Poor 
Henry in Nottingham hung upon the postman's 
heels, but no word arrived from the duchess. 
She was known to be assaulted from all sides by 
such applications: indeed her mail seems to have 
been very nearly as large as that of Mary Pick- 
ford or Theda Bara. Then, to his unspeakable 
anxiety, the miserable and fermenting Henry 
learned that all parcels sent to the duchess, unless 
marked with a password known only to her par- 
ticular correspondents, were thrown into a closet 



SHANDYGAFF 213 

by her porter to be reclaimed at convenience, or 
not at all. "I am ruined," cried Henry in agony; 
and the worthy Neville paid several unsuccess- 
ful visits to Devonshire House in the attempt to 
retrieve the manuscript. Finally, after waiting 
four hours in the servants' hall, he succeeded. 
Even then undaunted, this long-suffering older 
brother made one more try in the poet's behalf: 
he obtained a letter of introduction to the duchess, 
and called on her in person, wisely leaving the 
manuscript at home; and with the complaisance 
of the great the lady readily acquiesced in Henry's 
modest request. Her name was duly inscribed 
on the proper page of the little volume, and in 
course of time the customary morocco-bound 
copy reached her. Alas, she took no notice of it, 
and Mr. Southey surmises that "Involved as 
she was in an endless round of miserable follies, 
it is probable that she never opened the book." 

"Clifton Grove" was the title Henry gave the 
book, published in 1803. 

It is not necessary to take the poems in this 
little volume more seriously than any seventeen- 
year-old ejaculations. It is easy to see what Henry 's 
reading had been — Milton, Collins, and Gray, evi- 
dently. His unconscious borrowings from Milton 
do him great credit, as showing how thoroughly 
he appreciated good poetry. It seeped into his 



214 SHANDYGAFF 

mind and became part of his own outpourings. II 
Penseroso gushes to the surface of poor Henry 's 
song every few lines; precious twigs and shreds of 
Milton flow merrily down the current of his 
thought. And yet smile as we may, every now 
and then friend Henry puts something over. 
One of, his poems is a curious foretaste of what 
Keats was doing ten years later. Every now and 
then one pauses to think that this lad, once his 
youthful vapours were over, might have done 
great things. And as he says in his quaint 
little preface, "the unpremeditated effusions of a 
boy, from his thirteenth year, employed, not in the 
acquisition of literary information, but in the more 
active business of life, must not be expected to 
exhibit any considerable portion of the correct- 
ness of a Virgil, or the vigorous compression of a 
Horace." 

The publishing game was new to Henry, and 
the slings and arrows found an unshielded heart. 
When the first copies of his poor little book came 
home from the printer he was prostrated to find 
several misprints. He nearly swooned, but 
seizing a pen he carefully corrected all the copies. 
After writing earnest and very polite letters to 
all the reviewers he dispatched copies to the lead- 
ing periodicals, and sat down in the sure hope of 
rapid fame. How bitter was his chagrin when 



SHANDYGAFF 215 

the Monthly Review for February, 1804, came out 
with a rather disparaging comment: in particular 
the critic took umbrage at his having put boy to 
rhyme with sky, and added, referring to Henry's 
hopes of a college course, "If Mr. White should 
be instructed by alma mater, he will, doubtless, 
produce better sense and better rhymes." 

The review was by no means unjust: it said 
what any disinterested opinion must have con- 
firmed, that the youth's ambitions were excellent, 
but that neither he, nor indeed any two-footed 
singer, is likely to be an immortal poet by seven- 
teen. But Henry's sensitive soul had been so in- 
flated by the honest pride of his friends that he 
could only see gross and callous malignity and con- 
spiracy in the criticism. His theology, his health, his 
peace of mind, were all overthrown. As a matter 
of fact, however (as Southey remarks), it was the 
very brusqueness of this review that laid the 
foundation of his reputation. The circumstance 
aroused Southey 's interest in the young man's ef- 
forts to raise himself above his level in the world and 
it was the laureate who after Henry's death edited 
his letters and literary remains, and gave him to 
us as we have him. Southey tells us that after 
the young man's death he and Coleridge looked 
over, his papers with great emotion, and were 
amazed at the fervour of his industry and ambition. 



216 SHANDYGAFF 

Alas, we must hurry the narrative, on which 
one would gladly linger. The life of this sad 
and high-minded anchorite has a strong fascina- 
tion for me. Melancholy had marked him for 
her own : he himself always felt that he had not a 
long span before him. Hindered by deafness, 
threatened with consumption, and a deadlier 
enemy yet — epilepsy — his frail and uneasy spirit 
had full right to distrust its tenement. The 
summer of 1804 he spent partly at Wilford, a little 
village near Nottingham where he took lodgings. 
His employers very kindly gave him a generous 
holiday to recruit; but his old habits of excessive 
study seized him again. He had, for the time, 
given up hope of being able to attend the univer- 
sity, and accordingly thought it all the more nec- 
essary to do well at the law. Night after night 
he would read till two or three in the morning, lie 
down fully dressed on his bed, and rise again to 
work at five or six. His mother, who was living 
with him in his retreat, used to go upstairs to 
put out his candle and see that he went to bed; 
but Henry, so docile in other matters, in this was 
unconquerable. When he heard his mother's 
step on the stair he would extinguish the taper 
and feign sleep; but after she had retired he would 
light it again and resume his reading. Perhaps 
the best things he wrote were composed in this 



SHANDYGAFF 217 

period of extreme depression. The "Ode on Dis- 
appointment," and some of his sonnets, breathe a 
quiet dignity of resignation to sorrow that is very 
touching and even worthy of respect as poetry. 
He never escaped the cliche and the bathetic, but 
this is a fair example of his midnight musings at 
their highest pitch: — 

TO CONSUMPTION 

Gently, most gently, on thy victim's head, 
Consumption, lay thine hand. Let me decay, 
Like the expiring lamp, unseen, away, 
And softly go to slumber with the dead. 
And if 'tis true what holy men have said, 
That strains angelic oft foretell the day 
Of death, to those good men who fall thy prey, 
O let the aerial music round my bed, 
Dissolving sad in dying symphony, 
Whisper the solemn warning in mine ear; 
That I may bid my weeping friends good-byo, 
Ere I depart upon my journey drear: 
And smiling faintly on the painful past, 
Compose my decent head, and breathe my last 

But in spite of depression and ill health, he was 
really happy at Wilford, a village in the elbow of 
a deep gully on the Trent, and near his well-be- 
loved Clifton Woods. On the banks of the stream 
he would sit for hours in a maze of dreams, or 
wander among the trees on summer nights, awed 



218 SHANDYGAFF 

by the sublime beauty of the lightning, and heed- 
less of drenched and muddy clothes. 

Later in the summer it was determined that he 
should go to college after all; and by the generosity 
of a number of friends (including Neville who 
promised twenty pounds annually) he was able 
to enter himself for St. John's College, Cambridge. 
In the autumn he left his legal employers, who 
were very sorry to lose him, and took up quarters 
with a clergyman in Lincolnshire (Winteringham) 
under whom he pursued his studies for a year, to 
prepare himself thoroughly for college. His letters 
during this period are mostly of a religious tinge, 
enlivened only by a mishap while boating on the 
Humber when he was stranded for six hours on a 
sand-bank. He had become quite convinced that 
his calling was the ministry. The proper obser- 
vance of the Sabbath by his younger brothers and 
sisters weighed on his mind, and he frequently 
wrote home on this topic. 

In October, 1805, we find him settled at last in 
his rooms at St. John's, the college that is always 
dear to us as the academic home of two very dif- 
ferent undergraduates — William Wordsworth and 
Samuel Butler. His rooms were in the rearmost 
court, near the cloisters, and overlooking the 
famous Bridge of Sighs. His letters give us a 
pleasant picture of his quiet rambles through the 



SHANDYGAFF 219 

town, his solitary cups of tea as he sat by the fire, 
and his disappointment in not being able to hear 
his lecturers on account of his deafness. Most 
entertaining to any one at all familiar with the life 
of the Oxford and Cambridge colleges is his 
account of the thievery of his "gyp" (the man- 
servant who makes the bed, cares for the rooms, 
and attends to the wants of the students). 
Poor Henry's tea, sugar, and handkerchiefs began 
to vanish in the traditional way; but he was 
practical enough to buy a large padlock for his 
coal bin. 

But Henry's innocent satisfaction in having at 
last attained the haven of his desires was not long 
of duration. In spite of ill health, his tutors 
constrained him to enter for a scholarship ex- 
amination in December, and when the unfortu- 
nate fellow pleaded physical inability, they dosed 
him with "strong medicines" to enable him to 
face the examiners. After the ordeal he was so 
unstrung that he hurried off to London to spend 
Christmas with his aunt. 

The account of his year at college is very piti- 
ful. His tutors were, according to their lights, 
very kind; they relieved him as far as possible from 
financial worries, but they did not have sense 
enough to restrain him from incessant study. 
Even on his rambles he was always at work memo- 



220 SHANDYGAFF 

rizing Greek plays, mathematical theorems, or 
what not. In a memorandum found in his desk 
his life was thus planned: "Rise at half -past 
five. Devotions and walk till seven. Chapel 
and breakfast till eight. Study and lectures till 
one. Four and a half clear reading. Walk and 
dinner, and chapel to six. Six to nine reading. 
Nine to ten, devotions. Bed at ten." 

In the summer of 1806 his examiners ranked 
him the best man of his year, and in mistaken 
kindness the college decided to grant him the 
unusual compliment of keeping him in college 
through the vacation with a special mathematical 
tutor, gratis, to work with him, mathematics 
being considered his weakness. As his only 
chance of health lay in complete rest during the 
holiday, this plan of spending the summer in 
study was simply a death sentence. In July, 
while at work on logarithm tables, he was over- 
taken by a sudden fainting fit, evidently of an 
epileptic nature. The malady gained strength, 
aided by the weakness of his heart and lungs, and 
he died on October 19, 1806. 

Poor Henry ! Surely no gentler, more innocent 
soul ever lived. His letters are a golden treasury 
of earnest and solemn speculation. Perhaps once 
a twelvemonth he displays a sad little vein of 
pleasantry, but not for long. Probably the 



SHANDYGAFF 221 

light-hearted undergraduates about him found 
him a very prosy, shabby, amd mournful young 
man, but if one may judge by the outburst of 
tributary verses published after his death he was 
universally admired and respected. Let us close 
the story by a quotation from a tribute paid him 
by a lady versifier: 

If worth, if genius, to the world are dear, 
To Henry's shade devote no common tear. 
His worth on no precarious tenure hung, 
From genuine piety his virtues sprung: 
If pure benevolence, if steady sense, 
Can to the feeling heart delight dispense; 
If all the highest efforts of the mind, 
Exalted, noble, elegant, refined, 
Call for fond sympathy's heartfelt regret, 
Ye song of genius, pay the mournful debt! 



TRIVIA 

The secret thoughts of a man run over all things, holy, 
profane, clean, obscene, grave, and light, without shame or 
blame. — Hobbes, Leviathan, Chap. VHt. 



f I! "^HE bachelor is almost extinct in America. 
Our hopelessly utilitarian civilization 

JL demands that a man of forty should be 
rearing a family, should go to an office five times 
a week, and pretend an interest in the World's 
Series. It is unthinkable to us that there should 
be men of mature years who do not know the 
relative batting averages of the Red Sox and the 
Pirates. The intellectual and strolling male of 
from thirty-five to fifty-five years (which is what 
one means by bachelor) must either marry and 
settle down in the Oranges, or he must flee to 
Europe or the MacDowell Colony. There is no 
alternative. Vachel Lindsay please notice. 

The fate of Henry James is a case in point. 
Undoubtedly he fled the shores of his native 
land to escape the barrage of the bonbonniverous 
sub-deb, who would else have mown him down 
without ruth. 



SHANDYGAFF 223 

But in England they still linger, these quaint, 
phosphorescent middle-aged creatures, lurking 
behind a screenage of muffins and crumpets and 
hip baths. And thither fled one of the most 
delightful born bachelors this hemisphere has 
ever unearthed, Mr. Logan Pearsall Smith. 

Mr. Smith was a Philadelphian, born about 
fifty years ago. But that most amiable of cities 
does not encourage detached and meditative 
bachelorhood, and after sampling what is quaintly 
known as " a guarded education in morals and man- 
ners" at Haverford College, our hero passed to 
Harvard, and thence by a swifter decline to 
Oxford. Literature and liberalism became his 
pursuits; on the one hand, he found himself en- 
grossed in the task of proving to the British electo- 
rate that England need not always remain the 
same; on the other, he wrote a Life of Sir Henry 
Wotton, a volume of very graceful and beautiful 
short stories about Oxford ("The Youth of Parnas- 
sus") and a valuable little book on the history 
and habits of the English language. 

But in spite of his best endeavours to quench 
and subdue his mental humours, Mr. Smith found 
his serious moments invaded by incomprehen- 
sible twinges of esprit. Travelling about Eng- 
land, leading the life of the typical English bache- 
lor, equipped with gladstone bag, shaving kit, 



224 SHANDYGAFF 

evening clothes and tweeds; passing froni country 
house to London club, from Oxford common room 
to Sussex gardens, the solemn pageantry of the 
cultivated classes now and then burst upon him 
in its truly comic aspect. The tinder and steel 
of his wit, too uncontrollably frictioned, ignited a 
shower of roman candles, and we conceive him 
prostrated with irreverent laughter in some lonely 
railway carriage. 

Mr. Smith did his best to take life seriously, and 
I believe he succeeded passably well until after 
forty years of age. But then the spectacle of the 
English vicar toppled him over, and once the 
gravity of the Church of England is invaded, all 
lesser Alps and sanctuaries lie open to the scourge. 
Menaced by serious intellectual disorders unless 
he were to give vent to these disturbing levities, 
Mr. Smith began to set them down under the 
title of "Trivia/' and now at length we are en- 
riched by the spectacle of this iridescent and 
puckish little book, which presents as it were a 
series of lantern slides of an ironical, whimsical, 
and merciless sense of humour. It is a motion 
picture of a middle-aged, phosphorescent mind 
that has long tried to preserve a decent melancholy 
but at last capitulates in the most delicately intel- 
lectual brainslide of our generation. 

This is no Ring Lardner,no Irvin Cobb, no Casey 



SHANDYGAFF 225 

at the bat. Mr. Smith is an infinitely close and 
acute observer of sophisticated social life, tinged 
with a faint and agreeable refined sadness, by an 
aura of shyness which amounts to a spiritual vir- 
ginity. He comes to us trailing clouds of glory 
from the heaven of pure and unfettered specula- 
tion which is our home. He is an elf of utter 
simplicity and infinite candour. He is a flicker 
of absolute Mind. His little book is as precious 
and as disturbing as devilled crabs. 

Blessed, blessed little book, how you will run 
like quicksilver from mind to mind, leaping — a 
shy and shining spark — from brain to brain! I 
know of nothing since Lord Bacon quite like these 
ineffably dainty little paragraphs of gilded whim, 
these rainbow nuggets of wistful inquiry, these 
butterfly wings of fancy, these pointed sparklers 
of wit. A purge, by Zeus, a purge for the wicked ! 
Irony so demure, so quaint, so far away; pathos 
so void of regret, merriment so delicate that one 
dare not laugh for fear of dispelling the charm — 
all this is "Trivia." Where are Marcus Aurelius 
or Epictetus or all the other Harold Bell Wrights 
of old time? Baron Verulam himself treads a 
heavy gait beside this airy elfin scamper. It is 
Atalanta's heels. It is a heaven-given scena- 
rio of that shyest, dearest, remotest of essences — 
the mind of a strolling bachelor. 



226 SHANDYGAFF 

Bless his heart, in a momentary panic of mod- 
esty at the thought of all his sacred spots laid bare, 
the heavenly man tries to scare us away. " These 
pieces of moral prose have been written, dear 
Reader, by a large, Carnivorous Mammal, belong- 
ing to that suborder of the Animal Kingdom 
which includes also the Orange-outang, the tusked 
Gorilla, the Baboon, with his bright blue and 
scarlet bottom, and the gentle Chimpanzee." 

But this whimsical brother to the chimpanzee, 
despite this last despairing attempt at modest 
evasion, denudes himself before us. And his 
heart, we find, is strangely like our own. His 
reveries, his sadnesses, his exhilarations, are all 
ours, too. Like us he cries, "I wish I were un- 
flinching and emphatic, and had big bushy eye- 
brows and a Message for the Age. I wish I were 
a deep Thinker, or a great Ventriloquist." Like 
us he has that dreadful feeling (now and then) of 
being only a ghost, a thin, unreal phantom in a 
world of bank cashiers and duchesses and pros- 
perous merchants and other Real Persons. Like 
us he fights a losing battle against the platitudes 
and moral generalizations that hem us round. 
"I can hardly post a letter," he laments, "without 
marvelling at the excellence and accuracy of the 
Postal System." And he consoles himself, good 
man, with the thought of the meaningless creation 



SHANDYGAFF <m 

crashing blindly through frozen space. His other 
great consolation is his dear vice of reading — 
"This joy not dulled by Age, this polite and un- 
punished vice, this selfish, serene, life-long in- 
toxication." 

It is impossible by a few random snippets to 
give any just figment of the delicious mental 
intoxication of this piercing, cathartic little 
volume. It is a bright tissue of thought robing a 
radiant, dancing spirit. Through the shimmering 
veil of words we catch, now and then, a flashing 
glimpse of the Immortal Whimsy within, shy, 
sudden, and defiant. Across blue bird-haunted 
English lawns we follow that gracious figure, 
down dusky London streets where he is peering 
in at windows and laughing incommunicable jests. 

But alas, Mr. Pearsall Smith is lost to America. 
The warming pans and the twopenny tube have 
lured him away from us. Never again will he 
tread on peanut shells in the smoking car or read 
the rimes about Phoebe Snow. Chiclets and 
Spearmint and Walt Mason and the Toonerville 
Trolley and the Prince Albert ads — these mean 
nothing to him. He will never compile an 
anthology of New York theatrical notices: "The 
play that makes the dimples to catch the tears." 
Careful and adroit propaganda, begun twenty 
years ago by the Department of State, might have 



228 SHANDYGAFF 

won him back, but now it is impossible to repat- 
riate him. The exquisite humours of our Ameri- 
can life are faded from his mind. He has gone 
across the great divide that separates a subway 
from an underground and an elevator from a lift. 
I wonder does he ever mourn the scrapple and 
buckwheat cakes that were his birthright? 

Major George Haven Putnam in his "Memo- 
ries of a Publisher" describes a famous tennis 
match played at Oxford years ago, when he and 
Pearsall Smith defeated A. L. Smith and Herbert 
Fisher, the two gentlemen who are now Master of 
Balliol and British Minister of Education. The 
Balliol don attributed the British defeat in this in- 
ternational tourney to the fact that his tennis shoes 
(shall we say his "sneakers?") came to grief and 
he had to play the crucial games in stocking feet. 
But though Major Putnam and his young ally 
won the set of patters (let us use the Wykehamist 
word), the Major allowed the other side to gain 
a far more serious victory. They carried off the 
young Philadelphian and kept him in England 
until he was spoiled for all good American uses. 
That was badly done, Major! Because we 
needed Pearsall Smith over here, and now we 
shall never recapture him. He will go on calling 
an elevator a lift, and he will never write an 
American "Trivia." 



PREFACES 

IT HAS long been my conviction that the 
most graceful function of authorship is the 
writing of prefaces. What is more pleasant 
than dashing off those few pages of genial intro- 
duction after all the dreary months of spading at 
the text? A paragraph or two as to the intentions 
of the book; allusions to the unexpected difficulties 
encountered during composition; neatly phrased 
gratitude to eminent friends who have given 
gracious assistance; and a touching allusion to the 
Critic on the Hearth who has done the indexing — 
one of the trials of the wives of literary men not 
mentioned by Mrs. Andrew Lang in her pleasant 
essay on that topic. A pious wish to receive 
criticisms "in case a second edition should be 
called for"; your address, and the date, add a 
homely touch at the end. 

How delightful this bit of pleasant intimacy 
after the real toil is over! It is like paterfamilias 
coming out of his house at dusk, after the hard 
day's work, to read his newspaper on the door- 
step. Or it may be a bit of superb gesturing. No 
book is complete without a preface. Better a 
preface without a book. . . . 



230 SHANDYGAFF 

Many men have written books without pref- 
aces. But not many have written prefaces with- 
out books. And yet I am convinced it is one of 
the subtlest pleasures. I have planned several 
books, not yet written; but the prefaces are all 
ready this many a day. Let me show you the sort 
of thing I mean. 

PREFACE TO "THE LETTERS OP ANDREW MCGILL" 

How well I remember the last time I saw An- 
drew McGill! It was in the dear old days at Rut- 
gers, my last term. I was sitting over a book one 
brilliant May afternoon, rather despondent — 
tn^re came a rush up the stairs and a thunder at 
the door. I knew his voice, and hurried to open. 
Poor, dear fellow, he was just back from tennis; 
I never saw him look so glorious. Tall and thin — 
he was always very thin, see p. 219 and passim — 
with his long, brown face and sparkling black 
eyes — I can see him still rambling about the room 
in his flannels, his curly hair damp on his forehead. 
"Buzzard," he said — he always called me Buz- 
zard — "guess what's happened?" 

"In love again?" I asked. 

He laughed. A bright, golden laugh — I can 
hear it still. His laughter was always infec- 
tious. 

"No," he said. "Dear silly old Buzzard, what 



SHANDYGAFF 231 

do you think? I've won the Sylvanus Stall 
fellowship." 

I shall never forget that moment. It was very 
still, and in the college garden, just under my 
window, I could hear a party of Canadian girls 
deliciously admiring things. It was a cruel 
instant for me. I, too, in my plodding way, 
had sent in an essay for the prize, but without tell- 
ing him. Must I confess it? I had never dared 
mention the subject for fear he, too, would com- 
pete. I knew that if he did he was sure to win. 
O petty jealousies, that seem so bitter now ! 

"Rude old Buzzard," he said in his bantering 
way, "you haven't congratulated!" 

I pulled myself together. 

"Brindle," I said — I always called him Brindle; 
how sad the nickname sounds now — "you took 
my breath away. Dear lad, I'm overjoyed." 

It is four and twenty years since that May 
afternoon. I never saw him again. Never even 
heard him read the brilliant poem "Sunset from 
the Mons Veneris" that was the beginning of his 
career, for the week before commencement I was 
taken ill and sent abroad for my health. I never 
came back to New York; and he remained there. 
But I followed his career with the closest attention. 
Every newspaper cutting, every magazine article 
in which his name was mentioned, went into my 



232 SHANDYGAFF 

scrapbook. And almost every week for twenty 
years he wrote to me — those long, radiant letters, 
so full of verve and elan and ringing, ruthless wit. 
There was always something very Gallic about his 
saltiness. "Oh, to be born a Frenchman!" he 
writes. "Why wasn't I born a Frenchman 
instead of a dour, dingy Scotsman? Oh, for the 
birthright of Montmartre! Stead of which I have 
the mess of pottage — stodgy, porridgy Scots 
pottage" (seep. 189). 

He had his sombre moods, too. It was char- 
acteristic of him, when in a pet, to wish he had 
been born other-where than by the pebbles of 
Arbroath. " Oh, to have been born a Norseman ! " 
he wrote once. "Oh, for the deep Scandinavian 
scourge of pain, the inbrooding, marrowy soul-ache 
of Ibsen! That is the fertilizing soil of tragedy. 
Tragedy springs from it, tall and white and stately 
like the lily from the dung. I will never be a 
tragedian. Oh, pebbles of Arbroath!" 

All the world knows how he died. . . . 

PREFACE TO AN HISTORICAL WORK 

(In six volumes) 

The work upon which I have spent the best 
years of my life is at length finished. After two 
decades of uninterrupted toil, enlivened only by 
those small bickerings over minutiae so dear to all 



SHANDYGAFF 233 

scrupulous writers, I may perhaps be pardoned 
if I philosophize for a few moments on the func- 
tions of the historian. 

There are, of course, two technical modes of 
approach, quite apart from the preparatory con- 
templation of the field. (This last, I might add, 
has been singularly neglected by modern histor- 
ians. My old friend, Professor Spondee, of Halle, 
though deservedly eminent in his chosen lot, is 
particularly open to criticism on this ground. I 
cannot emphasize too gravely the importance of 
preliminary calm — what Hobbes calls "the un- 
prejudicated mind." But this by way of paren- 
thesis.) One may attack the problem with the 
mortar trowel, or with the axe. Sismondi, I think, 
has observed this. 

Some such observations as these I was privi- 
leged to address to my very good friend, Professor 
Fish, of Yale, that justly renowned seat of learn- 
ing, when lecturing in New Haven recently. His 
reply was witty — too witty to be apt, "Piscem 
natare doces," he said. 

I will admit that Professor Fish may be free from 
taint in this regard; but many historians of to-day 
are, I fear, imbued with that most dangerous 
tincture of historical cant which lays it down as a 
maxim that contemporary history cannot be ju- 
dicially written. 



234 SHANDYGAFF 

Those who have been kind enough to display 
some interest in the controversy between myself 
and M. Rougegorge — of the Sorbonne — in the 
matter of Lamartine's account of the elections to 
the Constituent Assembly of 1848, will remark 
several hitherto unobserved errors in Lamartine 
which I have been privileged to point out. For 
instance, Lamartine (who is supported in Mo by 
M. Rougegorge) asserts that the elections took 
place on Easter Sunday, April 27, 1848. Where- 
as, I am able to demonstrate, by reference to the 
astronomical tables at Kew Observatory, that in 
1848 Easter Day fell upon April 23. M. Rouge- 
gorge's assertion that Lamartine was a slave to 
opium rests upon a humorous misinterpretation of 
Mme. Lamartine's diary. (The matter may be 
looked up by the curious in Annette Oser's 
"Annees avec les Lamartines." Oser was for 
many years the cook in Lamartine's household, 
and says some illuminating things regarding L.'s 
dislike of onions.) 

It is, of course, impossible for me to acknowledge 
individually the generous and stimulating assist- 
ance I have received from so many scholars in all 
parts of the world. The mere list of names would 
be like Southey's "Cataract of Lodore," and 
would be but an ungracious mode of returning 
thanks. I cannot, however, forbear to mention 



SHANDYGAFF 235 

Professor Mandrake, of the Oxford Chair, optimus 
maximus among modern historians. Of him I 
may say, in the fine words of Virgil, "Sedet 
aeternumque sedebit." 

My dear wife, fortunately a Serb by birth, has 
regularized my Slavic orthography, and has 
grown gray in the service of the index. To her, 
and to my little ones, whose merry laughter has 
so often penetrated to my study and cheered me 
at my travail, I dedicate the whole. 89, Decam- 
eron Gardens. 

PREFACE TO A BOOK OF POEMS 

This little selection of verses, to which I have 
given the title "Rari Nantes," was made at the 
instance of several friends. I have chosen from 
my published works those poems which seemed 
to me most faithfully to express my artistic mes- 
sage; and the title obviously implies that I think 
them the ones most likely to weather the mael- 
stroms of Time. Be that as it may. 

Vachel Lindsay and I have often discussed over 
a glass of port (one glass only: alas, that Vachel 
should abstain!) the state of the Muse to-day. 
He deems that she now, has fled from cities to 
dwell on the robuster champaigns of Illinois and 
Kansas. Would that I could agree; but I see her 
in the cities and everywhere, set down to menial 






236 SHANDYGAFF 

taskwork. She were better in exile, on Ibsen's 
sand dunes or Maeterlinck's bee farm. But in 
America the times are very evil. Prodigious 
convulsion of production, the grinding of mighty 
forces, the noise and rushings of winds — and what 
avails? Parturiunt monies . . . you know 
the rest. The ridiculous mice squeak and scam- 
per on the granary floor. They may play undis- 
turbed, for the real poets, those great gray felines, 
are sifting loam under Westminster. Gramercy 
Park and the Poetry Society see them not. 

It matters not. With this little book my task is 
done. Vachel and I sail to-morrow for Nova 
Zembla. 
The Qrotto, Yonhers. 

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION 

A second edition of "Rari Nantes" having been 
called for, I have added three more poems, 
Esquimodes written since arriving here. Also the 
"Prayer for Warm Weather," by Vachel Lindsay, 
is included, at his express request. The success 
of the first edition has been very gratifying to 
me. My publishers will please send reviews to 
Bleak House, Nova Zembla. 

PBEFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION 

The rigorous climate of Nova Zembla I find 
most stimulating to production, and therefore in 



SHANDYGAFF 237 

this new edition I am able to include several new 
poems. "The Ode to a Seamew," the "Fracas 
on an Ice Floe," and the sequence of triolimericks 
are all new. If I have been able to convey any- 
thing of the bracing vigour of the Nova Zembla 
locale the praise is due to my friendly and sug- 
gestive critic, the editor of Gooseflesh, the lead- 
ing Nova Zemblan review. 

Vachel Lindsay's new book, "The Tango," 
has not yet appeared, therefore I may perhaps 
say here that he is hard at work on an "Ode to the 
Gulf Stream," which has great promise. 

The success of this little book has been such 
that I am encouraged to hope that the publisher's 
exemption of royalties will soon be worked off. 



THE SKIPPER 

I HAVE been reading again that most delight- 
ful of all autobiographies, "A Personal 
Record," by Joseph Conrad. Mr. Conrad's 
mind is so rich, it has been so well mulched by 
years of vigorous life and sober thinking, that it 
pushes tendrils of radiant speculation into every 
crevice of the structure upon which it busies 
itself. This figure of speech leaves much to be 
desired and calls for apology, but in perversity 
and profusion the trellis growth of Mr. Conrad's 
memories, here blossoming before the delighted 
reader's eyes, runs like some ardent trumpet vine 
or Virginia creeper, spreading hither and thither, 
redoubling on itself, branching unexpectedly upon 
spandrel and espalier, and repeatedly enchanting 
us with some delicate criss-cross of mental fibres. 
One hesitates even to suggest that there may be 
admirers of Mr. Conrad who are not familiar with 
this picture of his mind — may we call it one of the 
most remarkable minds that has ever concerned 
itself with the setting of English words horizontally 
in parallel lines? 
The fraternity of gentlemen claiming to have 



SHANDYGAFF 239 

been the first on this continent to appreciate 
the vaulting genius of Mr. Conrad grows numer- 
ous indeed; almost as many as the discoverers of 
O. Henry and the pallbearers of Ambrose Bierce. 
It would be amusing to enumerate the list of those 
who have assured me (over the sworn secrecy of a 
table d'hote white wine) that they read the proof- 
sheets of "Almayer's Folly" in 1895, etc., etc. For 
my own part, let me be frank. I do not think I ever 
heard of Mr. Conrad before December 2, 1911. On 
that date, which was one day short of the twenty- 
seventh anniversary of Stevenson's death, a small 
club of earnest young men was giving a dinner to 
Sir Sidney Colvin at the Randolph Hotel in 
Oxford. Sir Sidney told us many anecdotes of 
R. L. S., and when the evening was far spent I 
remember that someone asked him whether there 
was any writer of to-day in whom he felt the 
same passionate interest as in Stevenson, any 
man now living whose work he thought would 
prove a permanent enrichment of English liter- 
ature. Sir Sidney Colvin is a scrupulous and 
sensitive critic, and a sworn enemy of loose state- 
ment; let me not then pretend to quote him exactly; 
but I know that the name he mentioned was that 
of Joseph Conrad, and it was a new name to 
me. 

Even so, I think it was not until over a year later 



240 SHANDYGAFF 

that first I read one of Mr. Conrad's books; and I 
am happy to remember that it was "Typhoon," 
which I read at one sitting in the second-class dining 
saloon of the Celtic, crossing from New York in 
January, 1913. There was a very violent westerly 
gale at the time — a famous shove, Captain Conrad 
would call it — and I remember that the baro- 
meter went lower than had ever been recorded 
before on the western ocean. The piano in the 
saloon carried away, and frolicked down the aisle 
between the tables: it was an ideal stage set for 
" Typhoon." The saloon was far aft, and a hatch- 
way just astern of where I sat was stove in by the 
seas. By sticking my head through a window I 
could see excellent combers of green sloshing down 
into the 'tweendecks. 

But the inspired discursiveness of Mr. Conrad 
is not to be imitated here. The great pen which 
has paid to human life "the undemonstrative trib- 
ute of a sigh which is not a sob, and of a smile 
which is not a grin," needs no limping praise of 
mine. But sometimes, when one sits at midnight 
by the fainting embers and thinks that of all 
novelists now living one would most ardently 
yearn to hear the voice and see the face of Mr. 
Conrad, then it is happy to recall that in "A Per- 
sonal Record" one comes as close as typography 
permits to a fireside chat with the Skipper himself. 



SHANDYGAFF 241 

He tells us that he has never been very well ac- 
quainted with the art of conversation, but re- 
membering Marlowe, we set this down as polite 
modesty only. Here in the "Personal Record" 
is Marlowe ipse, pipe in mouth, and in retrospec- 
tive mood. This book and the famous preface 
to the "Nigger" give us the essence, the bouillon, 
of his genius. Greatly we esteem what Mr. 
Walpole, Mr. Powys, Mr. James, and (optimus 
maximus) Mr. Follett, have said about him; but 
who would omit the chance to hear him from his 
proper mouth? And in these informal confessions 
there are pieces that are destined to be classics 
of autobiography as it is rarely written. 

One cannot resist the conviction that Mr. Con- 
rad, traditionally labelled complex and tortuous 
by the librarians, is in reality as simple as lightning 
or dawn. Fidelity, service, sincerity — those are 
the words that stand again and again across his 
pages. "I have a positive horror of losing even 
for one moving moment that full possession of 
myself which is the first condition of good ser- 
vice." He has carried over to the world of desk 
and pen the rigorous tradition of the sea. He 
says that he has been attributed an unemotional, 
grim acceptance of facts, a hardness of heart. To 
which he answers that he must tell as he sees, 
and that the attempt to move others to the 



242 SHANDYGAFF 

extremities of emotion means the surrendering 
one's self to exaggeration, allowing one's self to 
be carried away beyond the bounds of normal 
sensibility. Self-restraint is the duty, the dignity, 
the decency of the artist. This, indeed, is the 
creed of the simple man in every calling; and from 
this angle it appears that it is the Polyananiases 
and the Harold Bell Wrights who are compli- 
cated and subtle; it is Mr. Conrad, indeed, who 
is simple with the great simplicity of life and 
death. 

Truly in utter candour and simplicity no book 
of memoirs since the synoptic gospels exceeds 
"A Personal Record." Such minor facts as 
where the writer was born, and when, and the 
customary demonology of boyhood and courtship 
and the first pay envelope, are gloriously ignored. 
A statistician, an efficiency pundit, a literary ac- 
countant, would rise from the volume nervously 
shattered from an attempt to grasp what it was 
all about. The only person in the book who is 
accorded any comprehensive biographical resume 
is a certain great-uncle of Mr. Conrad, Mr. 
Nicholas B., who accompanied Bonaparte on his 
midwinter junket to Moscow, and was bitterly 
constrained to eat a dog in the forests of Lith- 
uania. To the delineation of this warrior, who 
was a legend of his youth, Mr. Conrad devotes his 



SHANDYGAFF 243 

most affectionate and tender power of whimsical 
reminiscence; and in truth his sketches of family- 
history make the tragedies of Poland clearer to me 
than several volumes of historical comment. In 
his prose of that superbly rich simplicity of texture 
— it is a commonplace that it seems always like 
some notable translation from the French — he 
looks back across the plains of Ukraine, and 
takes us with him so unquestionably that even 
the servant who drives him to his uncle's house 
becomes a figure in our own daily lives. And to 
our delicious surprise we find that the whole of two 
long chapters constitutes merely his musings in 
half an hour while he is waiting for dinner at his 
uncle's house. With what adorable tenderness 
he reviews the formative contours of boyish mem- 
ories, telling us the whole mythology of his youth! 
Upon my soul, sometimes I think that this is the 
only true autobiography ever written: true to the 
inner secrets of the human soul. It is the pass- 
key to the Master's attitude toward all the dear 
creations of his brain; it is the spiritual scenario 
of every novel he has written. What self- 
revealing words are these: "An imaginative 
and exact rendering of authentic memories may 
serve worthily that spirit of piety toward all things 
human which sanctions the conceptions of a writer 
of tales." And when one stops to consider, how 



244 SHANDYGAFF 

essentially impious and irreverent to humanity 
are the novels of the Slop and Glucose school! 

This marvellous life, austere, glowing, faithful 
to everything that deserves fidelity, contradictory 
to all the logarithms of probability, this tissue of 
unlikelihoods by which a Polish lad from the heart 
of Europe was integrated into the greatest living 
master of those who in our tongue strive to por- 
tray the riddles of the human heart — such is the 
kind of calculus that makes "A Personal Record" 
unique among textbooks of the soul. It is as 
impossible to describe as any dear friend. Setting 
out only with the intention to "present faithfully 
the feelings and sensations connected with the 
writing of my first book and with my first contact 
with the sea," Mr. Conrad set down what is really 
nothing less than a Testament of all that is most 
precious in human life. And the sentiment with 
which one lays it by is that the scribbler would 
gladly burn every shred of foolscap he had black- 
ened and start all over again with truer ideals 
for his craft, could he by so doing have chance to 
meet the Skipper face to face. 

Indeed, if Mr. Conrad had never existed it 
would have been necessary to invent him, the 
indescribable improbability of his career speaks 
so closely to the heart of every lover of literary 
truth. Who of his heroes is so fascinating to us 



SHANDYGAFF 245 

as he himself? How imperiously, by his own 
noble example, he recalls us to the service of 
honourable sincerity. And how poignantly these 
memories of his evoke the sigh which is not a 
sob, the smile which is not a grin. 



A FRIEND OF FITZGERALD 

' Loder is a Rock of Ages to rely on. 

— Edward FitzGebald. 

I HEARD the other day of the death of dear 
old John Loder, the Woodbridge book- 
seller, at the age of ninety-two. Though 
ill equipped to do justice to his memory, it seems 
to me a duty, and a duty that I take up gladly. 
It is not often that a young man has the good 
fortune to know as a friend one who has been a 
crony of his own grandfather and great-grand- 
father. Such was my privilege in the case of John 
Loder, a man whose life was all sturdy simplicity 
and generous friendship. He shines in no merely 
reflected light, but in his own native nobility. I 
think there are a few lovers of England and of 
books who will be glad not to forget his unobtru- 
sive services to literature. If only John Loder 
had kept a journal it would be one of the minor 
treasures of the Victorian Age. He had a racy, 
original turn of speech, full of the Suffolk lingo 
that so delighted his friend FitzGerald; full, too, 
of the delicacies of rich thought and feeling. He 

246 



SHANDYGAFF 247 

used to lament in his later years that he had not 
kept a diary as a young man. Alas that his Bos- 
well came too late to do more than snatch at a 
few of his memories. 

There is a little Suffolk town on the salt tide- 
water of the Deben, some ten miles from the sea. 
Its roofs of warm red tile are clustered on the hill- 
slopes that rim down toward the river; a massive, 
gray church tower and a great windmill are 
conspicuous landmarks. Broad barges and shab- 
by schooners, with ruddy and amber sails, lie at 
anchor or drop down the river with the tide, 
bearing the simple sailormen of Mr. W. W. 
Jacobs's stories. In the old days before the rail- 
way it was a considerable port and a town of 
thriving commerce. But now — well, it is little 
heard of in the annals of the world. 

Yet Woodbridge, unknown to the tourist, has 
had her pilgrims, too, and her nook in literature. 
It was there that George Crabbe of Aldeburgh 
was apprenticed to a local surgeon and wrote 
his first poem, unhappily entitled "Inebriety." 
There lived Bernard Barton, "the Quaker poet," 
a versifier of a very mild sort, but immortal by 
reason of his friendships with greater men. 
Addressed to Bernard Barton, in a plain, neat 
hand, came scores of letters to Woodbridge in the 
eighteen- twenties, letters now famous, which 



248 SHANDYGAFF 

found their way up Church Street to Alexander's 
Bank. They were from no less a man than Charles 
Lamb. Also I have always thought it very much 
to Woodbridge's credit that a certain Wood- 
bridgian named Pulham was a fellow-clerk of 
Lamb's at the East India House. Perhaps Mr. 
Pulham introduced Lamb and Barton to each 
other. And as birthplace and home of Edward 
FitzGerald, Woodbridge drew such visitors as 
Carlyle and Tennyson, who came to seek out the 
immortal recluse. In the years following Fitz- 
Gerald's death many a student of books, some all 
the way from America, found his way into John 
Loder's shop to gossip about "Old Fitz." In 
1893 a few devoted members of the Omar Khay- 
yam Club of London pilgrimaged to Woodbridge 
to plant by the grave at Boulge (please pronounce 
"Bowidge") a rosetree that had been raised from 
seed brought from the bush that sheds its petals 
over the dust of the tent-maker at Naishapur. 
In 1909 Woodbridge and Ipswich celebrated the 
FitzGerald centennial. And Rupert Brooke's 
father was (I believe) a schoolboy at Woodbridge; 
alas that another of England's jewels just missed 
being a Woodbridgian! 

Some day, if you are wise, you, too, will take a 
train at Liverpool Street, and drawn by one of 
those delightful blue locomotives of the Great 



SHANDYGAFF 249 

Eastern Railway speed through Colchester and 
Ipswich and finally set foot on the yellow-pebbled 
platform at Woodbridge. As you step from the 
stuffy compartment the keen salt Deben air will 
tingle in your nostrils; and you may discover in 
it a faint under-whiff of strong tobacco — the 
undying scent of pipes smoked on the river wall 
by old Fitz, and in recent years by John Loder 
himself. If you have your bicycle with you, or 
are content to hire one, you will find that rolling 
Suffolk country the most delightful in the world 
for quiet spinning. (But carry a repair kit, for 
there are many flints!) Ipswich itself is full of 
memories — of Chaucer, and Wolsey, and Dickens 
(it is the "Eatanswill" of Pickwick), and it is 
much pleasure to one of Suffolk blood to recall 
that James Harper, the grandfather of the four 
brothers who founded the great publishing house 
of Harper and Brothers a century ago, was an 
Ipswich man, born there in 1740. You will bike 
to Bury St. Edmunds (where Fitz went to school, 
and our beloved William McFee also!) and Alde- 
burgh, and Dunwich, to hear the chimes of the sea- 
drowned abbey ringing under the waves. If you 
are a Stevensonian, you will hunt out Cockfield 
Rectory, near Sudbury, where R. L. S. first met 
Sidney Colvin in 1872. (Colvin himself came 
from Bealings, only two miles from Woodbridge.) 



250 SHANDYGAFF 

You may ride to Dunmow in Essex, to see the 
country of Mr. Britling; and to Wigborough, near 
Colchester, the haunt of Mr. McFee's painter- 
cousin in "Aliens." You will hire a sailboat at 
Lime Kiln Quay or the Jetty and bide a moving 
air and a going tide to drop down to Bawdsey 
ferry to hunt shark's teeth and amber among the 
shingle. You will pace the river walk to Kyson 
— perhaps the tide will be out and sunset tints 
shimmer over those glossy stretches of mud. 
Brown seaweed, vivid green samphire, purple 
flats of slime where the river ran a few hours 
before, a steel-gray trickle of water in the scour 
of the channel and a group of stately swans ruf- 
fling there; and the huddled red roofs of the town 
with the stately church tower and the waving 
arms of the windmill looking down from the hill. 
It is a scene to ravish an artist. You may walk 
back by way of Martlesham Heath, stopping at 
the Red Lion for a quencher (the Red Lion 
figurehead is supposed to have come from one of 
the ships of the Armada). It is a different kind 
of Armada that Woodbridge has to reckon with 
nowadays. Zeppelins. One dropped a bomb — 
a "dud" it was — in John Loder's garden; the old 
man had to be restrained from running out to seize 
it with his own hands. 
John Loder was born in Woodbridge, August 3, 



SHANDYGAFF 251 

1825. His grandfather, Robert Loder, founded 
the family bookselling and printing business, which 
continues to-day at the old shop on the Thorough- 
fare under John Loder's son, Morton Loder. In 
the days before the railway came through, Wood- 
bridge was the commercial centre for a large sec- 
tion of East Suffolk; it was a busy port, and the 
quays were crowded with shipping. But when 
transportation by rail became swift and cheap 
and the provinces began to deal with London mer- 
chants, the little town's prosperity suffered a sad 
decline. Many of the old Woodbridge shops, of 
several generations' standing, have had to yield 
to local branches of the great London "stores." 
In John Loder's boyhood the book business was 
at its best. Woodbridgians were great readers, 
and such prodigal customers as FitzGerald did 
much to keep the ledgers healthy. John left 
school at thirteen or so, to learn the trade, and be- 
came the traditional printer's devil. He remem- 
bered Bernard Barton, the quiet, genial, brown- 
eyed poet, coming down the street from Alexan- 
der's Bank (where he was employed for forty 
years) with a large pile of banknotes to be re- 
numbered. The poet sat perched on a high stool 
watching young Loder and his superior do the 
work. And at noon Mr. Barton sent out to the 
Royal Oak Tavern near by for a basket of buns 



252 SHANDYGAFF 

and a jug of stout to refresh printer and devil at 
their work. 

Bernard Barton died in 1849, and was laid to 
rest in the little Friends' burying ground in Turn 
Lane. That quiet acre will repay the visitor's 
half-hour tribute to old mortality. My grand- 
mother was buried there, one snowy day in 
January, 1912, and I remember how old John 
Loder came forward to the grave, bareheaded and 
leaning on his stick, to drop a bunch of fresh 
violets on the coffin. 

Many a time I have sat in the quiet, walled-in 
garden of Burkitt House — that sweet plot of 
colour and fragrance so pleasantly commemorated 
by Mr. Mosher in his preface to " In Praise of Old 
Gardens" — and heard dear old John Loder tell 
stories of his youth. I remember the verse of 
Herrick he used to repeat, pointing round his little 
retreat with a well-stained pipestem: 

But walk'st about thine own dear bounds, 
Not envying others' larger grounds: 
For well thou know'st, 'tis not th' extent 
Of land makes life, but sweet content. 

Loder's memory used to go back to times that 
seem almost fabulous now. He had known quite 
well an English soldier who was on guard over 
Boney at St. Helena — in fact, he once published in 
some newspaper this man's observations upon the 



SHANDYGAFF 253 

fallen emperor, but I have not been able to 
trace the piece. He had been in Paris before the 
troubles of '48. I believe he served some sort of 
bookselling apprenticeship on Paternoster Row; 
at any rate, he used to be in touch with the London 
book trade as a young man, and made the ac- 
quaintance of Bernard Quaritch, one of the world's 
most famous booksellers. I remember his lament- 
ing that FitzGerald had not dumped the two 
hundred unsold booklets of Omar upon his counter 
instead of Quaritch's in 1859. The story goes that 
they were offered by Quaritch for a penny apiece. 
I always used to steer him onto the subject of 
FitzGerald sooner or later, and it was interesting 
to hear him tell how many princes of the literary 
world had come to his shop or had corresponded 
with him owing to his knowledge of E. F. G. 
Anne Thackeray gave him a beautiful portrait of 
herself in return for some courtesy he showed her. 
Robert H. Groome, the archdeacon of Suffolk, and 
his brilliant son, Francis Hindes Groome, the 
"Tarno Rye" (who wrote "Two Suffolk Friends" 
and was said by Watts Dunton to have known 
far more about the gipsies than Borrow) were 
among his correspondents.* John Hay, Elihu 

*No lover of FitzGerald can afford not to own that exquisite tributary volume 
"Edward FitzGerald: An Aftermath," by Francis Hindes Groome, which Mr. 
Mosher published in 1902. It tells a great deal about Woodbridge, and is annotated 
by John Loder. Mr. Mosher was eager to include Loder's portrait in it, but the old 
man's modesty was always as great as his generosity: he would not consent, 



254 SHANDYGAFF 

Vedder, Aldis Wright, Canon Ainger, Thomas B. 
Mosher, Clement Shorter, Dewitt Miller, Edward 
Clodd, Leon Vincent — such men as these wrote or 
came to John Loder when they wanted special news 
about FitzGerald. FitzGerald had given him a 
great many curios and personal treasures: Mr. 
Loder never offered these for sale at any price 
(anything connected with FitzGerald was sacred 
to him) but if any one happened along who seemed 
able to appreciate them he would give them away 
with delight. He gave to me FitzGerald's old 
musical scrapbook, which he had treasured for over 
thirty years. This scrapbook, in perfect condi- 
tion, contains very beautiful engravings, prints, 
and drawings of the famous composers, musicians, 
and operatic stars of whom Fitz was enivre as a 
young man. Among them are a great many 
drawings of Handel; FitzGerald, like Samuel 
Butler, was an enthusiastic Handelian. The pic- 
tures are annotated by E. F. G. and there are also 
two drawings of Beethoven traced by Thackeray. 
This scrapbook was compiled by FitzGerald 
when he and Thackeray were living together in 
London, visiting the Cave of Harmony and revel- 
ling in the dear delights of young intellectual 
companionship. Under a drawing of the famous 
Braham, dated 1831, Fitz has written: "As I 
saw and heard him many nights in the Pit of 



SHANDYGAFF Z55 

Covent Garden, in company with W. M. Thack- 
eray, whom I was staying with at the Bedford 
Coffee House." 

When I tried, haltingly, to express my thanks 
for such a gift, the old man said "That's nothing! 
That's nothing! It'll help to keep you out of 
mischief. Much better to give 'em away before 
it's too late!" And he followed it with Canon 
Ainger's two volumes of Lamb's letters, which 
Ainger had given him. 

Through his long life John Loder lived quietly 
in Woodbridge, eager and merry in his shop, a great 
reader, always delighted when any one came in who 
was qualified to discuss the literature which inter- 
ested him. He and FitzGerald had long cracks 
together and perhaps Loder may have accom- 
panied the Woodbridge Omar on some of those 
trips down the Deben on the Scandal or the 
Meum and Tuum (the Mum and Turn as Posh, 
Fitz's sailing master, called her). He played a 
prominent part in the life of the town, became a 
Justice of the Peace, and sat regularly on the 
bench until he was nearly ninety. As he entered 
upon the years of old age, came a delightful sur- 
prise. An old friend of his in the publishing busi- 
ness, whom he had known long before in London, 
died and left him a handsome legacy by will. 
Thus his last years were spared from anxiety and 



256 SHANDYGAFF 

he was able to continue his unobtrusive and quiet 
generosities which had always been his secret 
delight. 

Looking over the preceding paragraphs I am 
ashamed to see how pale and mumbling a tribute 
they are to this fine spirit. Could I but put him 
before you as he was in those last days ! I used to 
go up to Burkitt House to see him : in summer we 
would sit in the little arbour in the garden, or in 
winter by the fire in his dining room. He would 
talk and I would ask him questions; now and then 
he would get up to pull down a book, or to lead 
me into his bedroom to see some special treasure. 
He used to sit in his shirt-sleeves, very close to the 
fire, with his shoe laces untied. In summer he 
would toddle about in his shaggy blue suit, with 
a tweed cap over one ear, his grizzled beard and 
moustache well stained by much smoking, his 
eyes as bright and his tongue as brisk as ever. 
Every warm morning would see him down on the 
river wall; stumping over Market Hill and down 
Church Street with his stout oak stick, hailing 
every ohild he met on the pavement. His pocket 
was generally full of peppermints, and the young- 
sters knew well which pocket it was. His long 
life was a series of original and graceful kindnesses, 
always to those who needed them most and had 
no reason to expect them. No recluse he, no fine 



SHANDYGAFF 257 

scholar, no polished litterateur, but a hard- 
headed, soft-hearted human man of the sturdy 
old Suffolk breed. Sometimes I think he was, 
in his own way, just as great a man as the "Old 
Fitz," whom he loved and reverenced. 

He died on November 7, 1917, aged ninety-two 
years three months and four days. He was 
extraordinarily sturdy until nearly ninety — he 
went in bathing in the surf at Felixstowe on his 
eighty-sixth birthday. Perhaps the sincerest trib- 
ute I can pay him is these lines which I copy from 
my journal, dated July 16, 1913: 

"Went up to have tea with old John Loder, and 
said a cunningly veiled Good-bye to him. I 
doubt if I shall see him again, the dear old man. 
I think he felt so, too, for when he came to the 
door with me, instead of his usual remark about 
'Welcome the coming, speed the parting guest/ 
he said, ' Farewell to thee' in a more sober manner 
than his wont — and I left with an armful of books 
which he had given me 'to keep me out of mis- 
chief/ We had a good talk after tea — he told me 
about the adventures of his brothers, one of whom 
went out to New Zealand. He uses the most de- 
lightful brisk phrases in his talk, smiling away to 
himself and wrinkling up his forehead, which can 
only be distinguished from his smooth bald pate 
by its charming corrugation of parallel furrows. He 



258 SHANDYGAFF 

took me into his den while he rummaged through 
his books to find some which would be acceptable 
to me — 'May as well give 'em away before it's too 
late, ye know' — and then he settled back in his 
easy chair to puff at a pipe. I must note down 
one of his phrases which tickled me — he has such 
a knack for the proverbial and the epigrammatic. 
'He's cut his cloth, he can wear his breeches,' 
he said of a certain scapegrace. He chuckled over 
the Suffolk phrase 'a chance child,' for a bastard 
(alluding to one such of his acquaintance in old 
days). He constantly speaks of things he wants 
to do 'before I tarn my toes up to the daisies.' 
He told me old tales of Woodbridge in the time 
of the Napoleonic wars when there was a garrison 
of 5,000 soldiers quartered here — this was one of 
the regions in which an attack by Boney was 
greatly feared. He says that the Suffolk phrase 
'rafty weather' (meaning mist or fog) originates 
from that time, as being weather suitable for the 
French to make a surprise attack by rafts or flat- 
boats. 

"He chuckled over the reminiscence that he was 
once a great hand at writing obituary notices for 
the local paper. 'Weep, weep for him who cried 
for us,' was the first line of his epitaph upon a 
former Woodbridge town crier! I was thinking 
that it would be hard to do him justice when the 



SHANDYGAFF 259 

time comes to write his. May he have a swift and 
painless end such as his genial spirit deserves, 
and not linger on into a twilight life with failing 
senses. When his memory and his pipe and his 
books begin to fail him, when those keen old eyes 
grow dim and he can no longer go to sniff the salt 
air on the river-wall — then may the quick and 
quiet ferryman take dear old John Loder to the 
shadow land." 



A VENTURE IN MYSTICISM 

I HAD heard so much about this Rabbi 
Tagore and his message of calm for our 
hustling, feverish life, that I thought I 
would try to put some of that stuff into practice. 

"Shut out the clamour of small things. With- 
draw into the deep quiet of your soul, commune 
with infinite beauty and infinite peace. You must 
be full of gladness and love for every person and 
every tiniest thing. Great activity and worry is 
needless — it is poison to the soul. Learn to reflect, 
and to brood upon eternal beauty. It is the 
mystic who finds all that is most precious in life. 
The flowers of meditation blossom in his heart.*' 
I cut out these words and pasted them in my 
hat. I have always felt that my real genius lies 
in the direction of philosophic calm. I deter- 
mined to override the brutal clamour of petty 
things. 

The alarm clock rang as usual at 6.30. Calm- 
ly, with nothing but lovely thoughts in my mind, 
I threw it out of the window. I lay until eight 
o'clock, communing with infinite peace. I began 
to see that Professor Tagore was right. My 



SHANDYGAFF 26l 

wife asked me if I was going to the office. "I am 
brooding upon eternal beauty," I told her. 

She thought I was ill, and made me take break- 
fast in bed. 

I usually shave every morning, but a moment's 
thought will convince you that mystics do not do 
so. I determined to grow a beard. I lit a cigar, 
and replied "I am a mystic" to all my wife's 
inquiries. 

At nine o'clock came a telephone call from the 
office. My employer is not a devotee of eternal 
calm, I fear. When I explained that I was at 
home reading "GitanjahV" his language was far 
from mystical. "Get here by ten o'clock or you 
lose your job," he said. 

I was dismayed to see the same old throng 
in the subway, all the senseless scuffle and the 
unphilosophic crowd. But I felt full of gladness in 
my new way of life, full of brotherhood for all the 
world. "I love you," I said to the guard on the 
platform. He seized me by the shoulders and 
rammed me into the crowded car, shouting 
"Another nut!" 

When I reached the office my desk was littered 
with a hundred papers. The stenographer was 
at the telephone, trying to pacify someone. 
"Here he is now," I heard her say. 

It was Dennis & Company on the wire. 



262 SHANDYGAFF 

"How about that carload of Bavarian herrings 
we were to have yesterday without fail?" said 
Dennis. 

I took the 'phone. 

"In God's good time," I said, "the shipment 
will arrive. The matter is purely ephemeral, 
after all. If you will attune yourself " 

He rang off. 

I turned over the papers on my desk. Looked 
at with the unclouded eye of a mystic, how mun- 
dane and unnecessary all these pettifogging trans- 
actions seemed. Two kegs of salt halibut for the 
Cameron Stores, proofs of the weekly ad. for 
the Fishmongers' Journal, a telegram from the 
Uptown Fish Morgue, new tires needed for one 
of the delivery trucks — how could I jeopardize my 
faculty of meditation by worrying over these 
trifles? I leaned back in my chair and devoted 
myself to meditation. After all, the harassing 
domination of material things can easily be 
thrown off by a resolute soul. I was full of in- 
finite peace. I seemed to see the future as an 
ever- widening vista of sublime visions. My soul 
was thrilled with a universal love of humanity. 

The buzzer on my desk sounded. That meant 
that the boss wanted to see me. 

Now, it has always seemed to me that to put 
one's self at the beck and call of another man i* 



SHANDYGAFF 263 

essentially degrading. In the long perspective 
of eternity, was his soul any more majestic than 
mine? In this luminous new vision of my impor- 
tance as a fragment of immortal mind, could I, 
should I, bow to the force of impertinent triv- 
ialities? 

I sat back in my chair, full of love of humanity. 

By and by the boss appeared at my desk. One 
look at his face convinced me of the truth of 
Tagore's saying that great activity is poison to 
the soul. Certainly his face was poisonous. 

"Say," he shouted, "what the devil's the matter 
with you to-day? Dennis just called me up about 
that herring order " 

"Master," I said mildly, "be not overwrought. 
Great activity is a strychnine to the soul. I am 
a mystic. . . ." 

A little later I found myself on the street with 
two weeks' pay in my pocket. It is true that my 
departure had been hasty and unpleasant, for the 
stairway from the office to the street is long and 
dusty; but I recalled what Professor Tagore had 
said about vicissitudes being the true revealers of 
the spirit. My hat was not with me, but I 
remembered the creed pasted in it. After pacing 
a block or so, my soul was once more tranquil, 

I entered a restaurant. It was the noon hour, 
and the room was crowded with hurrying waiters 



264 SHANDYGAFF 

and impatient people. I found a vacant seat in a 
corner and sat down. I concentrated my mind 
upon the majestic vision of the brotherhood of 
man. 

Gradually I began to feel hungry, but no waiter 
came near me. Never mind, I thought: to shout 
and hammer the table as the others do is beneath 
the dignity of a philosopher. I began to dream of 
endless vistas of mystical ham and eggs. I brood- 
ed upon these for some time, but still no corporeal 
and physical units of food reached me. 

The man next me gradually materialized into 
my consciousness. Full of love for humanity I 
spoke to him. 

"Brother," I said, "until one of these priestly 
waiters draws nigh, will you not permit me to sus- 
tain myself with one of your rolls and one of your 
butter-balls? In the great brotherhood of hu- 
manity, all that is mine is yours; and per contra, 
all that is yours is mine." Beaming luminously 
upon him, I laid a friendly hand on his arm. 

He leaped up and called the head waiter. 
"Here's an attic for rent!" he cried coarsely. 
"He wants to pick my pocket." 

By the time I got away from the police station 
it was dusk, and I felt ready for home. I must 
say my broodings upon eternal beauty were 
beginning to be a little forced. As I passed along 



SHANDYGAFF 265 

the crowded street, walking slowly and with- 
drawn into the quiet of my soul, three people 
trod upon my heels and a taxi nearly gave me a 
passport to eternity. I reflected that men were 
perhaps not yet ready for these doctrines of infinite 
peace. How much more wise were the animals 
— and I raised my hand to stroke a huge dray- 
horse by the pavement. He seized my fingers 
in his teeth and nipped them vigorously. 

I gave a yell and ran full tilt to the nearest sub- 
way entrance. I burst into the mass of struggling, 
unphilosophic humanity and fought, shoved, 
cursed, and buffeted with them. I pushed three 
old ladies to one side to snatch my ticket before 
they could get theirs. I leaped into the car at 
the head of a flying wedge of sinful, unmystical 
men, who knew nothing of infinite beauty and 
peace. As the door closed I pushed a decrepit 
clergyman outside, and I hope he fell on the third 
rail. As I felt the lurching, trampling, throttling 
jam of humanity sway to and fro with the motion 
of the car, I drew a long breath. Dare I confess 
it? — I was perfectly happy! 



AN OXFORD LANDLADY 

IT WAS a crisp October afternoon, and along 
Iffley Road the wind was chivvying the 
yellow leaves. We stood at the window 
watching the flappers opposite play hockey. One 
of them had a scarlet tam-o'-shanter and glorious 
dark hair underneath it. ... A quiet tap at 
the door, gentle but definite, and in came Mrs. 
Beesley. 

If you have been at our digs, you know her by 
sight, and have not forgotten. Hewn of the real 
imperial marble is she, not unlike Queen Victoria 
in shape and stature. She tells us she used to 
dance featly and with abandon in days gone by, 
when her girlish slimness was the admiration 
of every greengrocer's assistant in Oxford — and 
even in later days when she and Dr. Warren 
always opened the Magdalen servants' ball to- 
gether. She and the courtly President were al- 
ways the star couple. I can see her doing the Sir 
Roger de Coverley. But the virgin zone was 
loosed long ago, and she has expanded with the 
British Empire. Not rotund, but rather impos- 
ingly cubic. Our hallway is a very narrow one, 



SHANDYGAFF 267 

and when you come to visit us of an evening, 
after red-cheeked Emily has gone off to better 
tilting grounds, it is a prime delight to see Mrs. 
Beesley backing down the passage (like a stately 
canal boat) before the advancing guest. Very 
large of head and very pink of cheek, very fond of 
a brisk conversation, some skill at cooking, slow 
and full of dignity on the stairs, much reminiscent 
of former lodgers, bold as a lion when she thinks 
she is imposed upon, but otherwhiles humorous 
and placable — such is our Mrs. Beesley. 

She saw us standing by the window, and thought 
we were watching the leaves twisting up the road- 
way in golden spirals. 

"Watching the wind?" she said pleasantly. 
" I loves to see the leaves 'avin' a frolic. They en- 
joys it, same as young gentlemen do." 

"Or young ladies?" I suggested. "We were 
watching the flappers play hockey, Mrs. Beesley. 
One of them is a most fascinating creature. I 
think her name must be Kathleen. . . ." 

Mrs. Beesley chuckled merrily and threw up her 
head in that delightful way of hers. " Oh, dear, Oh, 
dear, you're just like all the other gentlemen," she 
said. "Always awatchin' and awaitin' for the 
young ladies. Mr. Bye that used to be 'ere was 
just the same, an' he was engaged to be marrit. 
'Ad some of 'em in to tea once, he did. I thought 



268 SHANDYGAFF 

it was scandalous, and 'im almost a marrit gentle- 
man." 

"Don't you remember what the poet says, Mrs. 
Beesley?" I suggested: 

"Beauty must be scorned in none 
Though but truly served in one." 

"Not much danger of you gentlemen bein' too 
scornful," said Mrs. Beesley. Her eyes began to 
sparkle now that she saw herself fairly embarked 
upon a promising conversation. She sidled a 
little farther into the room. Lloyd winked at me 
and quietly escaped behind her. 

"Seeing as we're alone," said Mrs. Beesley, 
"I come to you to see about dinner to-night. I 
knows as you're the father of 'em all." (That 
is her quaint way of saying that she thinks me the 
leading spirit of the three who dig with her.) 
"How about a little jugged 'are? Nice little 'ares 
there are in Cowley Road now. I thinks 'are is 
very tender an' tasty. That, an' a nice 'ot cup 
o'tea?' 

The last 'are had been, in Tennyson's phrase, 
"the heir of all the ages," so I deprecated the sug- 
gestion. "I don't think hare agrees with Mr. 
Williams," I said. 

"'Ow about a pheasant?" said Mrs. Beesley, 
stroking the corner of the table with her hand as 



SHANDYGAFF 269 

she always does when in deep thought. "A 
pheasant and a Welsh rabbit, not too peppery. 
That goes well with the cider. Dr. Warren came 
'ere to dinner once, an' he had a Welsh rabbit 
and never forgot it. 'E alius used to say when 'e 
saw me, "Ow about that Welsh rabbit, Mrs. 
Beesley ? ' Oh, dear, Oh, dear, 'e is a kind gentleman ! 
'E gave us a book once — "Istory of Magdalen 
College.' I think he wrote it 'imself." 

"I think a pheasant would be very nice," I 
said, and began looking for a book. 

"Do you think Mr. Loomis will be back from 
town in time for dinner?" asked Mrs. Beesley. 
"I know Vs fond o' pheasant. He'd come if he 
knew." 

"We might send him a telegram," I said. 

"Oh, dear, Oh, dear!" sighed Mrs. Beesley, over- 
come by such a fantastic thought. "You know, 
Mr. Morley, a funny thing 'appened this morn- 
ing," she said. "Em'ly and I were making Mr. 
Loomis's bed. But we didn't find 'is clothes all 
lyin' about the floor same as 'e usually does. 
*I wonder what's 'appened to Mr. Loomis's 
clothes?' said Em'ly. 

" 'P'raps 'e's took 'em up to town to pawn 'em.' 
I said. (You know we 'ad a gent'man 'ere once 
that pawned nearly all 'is things — a Jesus gentle- 
man 'e was.) 



270 SHANDYGAFF 

"Em'ly says to me, *I wonder what the three 
balls on a pawnbroker's sign mean?' 

"'Why don't you know, Em'ly?' I says. It 
means it's two to one you never gets 'em back." 

Just then there was a ring at the bell and Mrs. 
Beesley rolled away chuckling. And I returned 
to the window to watch Kathleen play hockey. 
October, 1912. 



"PEACOCK PIE" 

ONCE a year or so one is permitted to find 
some book which brings a real tingle to 
that ribbon of the spinal marrow which 
responds to the vibrations of literature. Not a 
bad way to calendar the years is by the really good 
books they bring one. Each twelve month the 
gnomon on the literary sundial is likely to cast 
some shadow one will not willingly forget. Thus 
I mark 1916 as the year that introduced me to 
William McFee's "Casuals of the Sea" and But- 
ler's "Way of All Flesh"; 1915 most of us remem- 
ber as Rupert Brooke's year, or the year of the 
Spoon River Anthology, if you prefer that kind 
of thing; 1914 I notch as the season when I first 
got the hang of Bourget and Conrad. But per- 
haps best of all, in 1913 I read "Peacock Pie" 
and "Songs of Childhood," by Walter de la 
Mare. 

"Peacock Pie" having now been published in 
this country it is seasonable to kindle an altar 
fire for this most fanciful and delightful of 
present-day poets. It is curious that his work 
is so little known over here, for his first book, 



272 SHANDYGAFF 

"Songs of Childhood," was published in England 
in 1902. Besides, poetry he has written novels 
and essays, all shot through with a phospho- 
rescent sparkle of imagination and charm. He has 
the knack of "words set in delightful proportion"; 
and "Peacock Pie" is the most authentic knap- 
sack of fairy gold since the "Child's Garden of 
Verses." 

I am tempted to think that Mr. de la Mare is the 
kind of poet more likely to grow in England than 
America. The gracious and fine-spun fabric of 
his verse, so delicate in music, so quaint and 
haunting in imaginative simplicity, is the gift of 
a land and life where rewards and fairies are not 
wholly passed away. Emily Dickinson and Va- 
chel Lindsay are among our contributors to the 
songs of gramarye: but one has only to open 
"The Congo" side by side with "Peacock Pie" to 
eee how the seductions of ragtime and the clash- 
ing crockery of the Poetry Society's dinners are 
coarsening the fibres of Mr. Lindsay's marvellous 
talent as compared with the dainty horns of 
elfin that echo in Mr. de la Mare. And it is a 
long Pullman ride from Spoon River to the bee- 
droned gardens where De la Mare's old women 
sit and sew. Over here we have to wait for 
Barrie or Yeats or Padraic Colum to tell us about 
the fairies, and Cecil Sharp to drill us in their 



SHANDYGAFF ' 273 

'dances and songs. The gentry are not native in 
our hearts, and we might as well admit it. 

To say that Mr. de la Mare's verse is distilled 
in fairyland suggests perhaps a delicate and 
absent-minded figure, at a loss in the hurly burly 
of this world; the kind of poet who loses his rub- 
bers in the subway, drops his glasses in the trolley 
car, and is found wandering blithely in Central 
Park while the Women's Athenaeum of the 
Tenderloin is waiting four hundred strong for him 
to lecture. But Mr. de la Mare is the more 
modern figure who might readily (I hope I speak 
without offense) be mistaken for a New York 
stock broker, or a member of the Boston Chamber 
of Commerce. Perhaps he even belongs to the 
newer order of poets who do not wear rubbers. 

One's first thought (if one begins at the begin- 
ning, but who reads a book of poetry that way?) 
is that "Peacock Pie" is a collection of poems for 
children. But it is not that, any more than "The 
Masses" is a paper for the proletariat. Before 
you have gone very far you will find that the 
imaginary child you set out with has been mag- 
icked into a changeling. The wee folk have been 
at work and bewitched the pudding — the pie rather. 
The fire dies on the hearth, the candle channels in 
its socket, but still you read on. Some of the 
poems bring you the cauld grue of Thrawn Janet. 



274 SHANDYGAFF 

When at last you go up to bed, it will be with 
the shuddering sigh of one thrilled through and 
through with the sad little beauties of the world. 
Yqu will want to put out a bowl of fresh milk on 
the doorstep to appease the banshee — did you 
not know that the janitor of your Belshazzar 
Court would get it in the morning? 

One of the secrets of Mr. de la Mare's singular 
charm is his utter simplicity, linked with a deli- 
cately tripping music that intrigues the memory 
unawares and plays high jinks with you forever 
after. Who can read "Off the Ground" and not 
strum the dainty jig over and over in his head 
whenever he takes a bath, whenever he shaves, 
whenever the moon is young? I challenge you to 
resist the jolly madness of its infection; 

Three jolly Farmers 

Once bet a pound 

Each dance the others would 

Off the ground. 

Out of their coats 

They slipped right soon, 

And neat and nicesome, 

Put each his shoon. 

One— Two— Three— 

And away they go, 

Not too fast, 

And not too slow; 

Out from the elm-tree's 



SHANDYGAFF 275 

Noonday shadow, 

Into the sun 

And across the meadow. ^ 

Past the schoolroom, 

With knees well bent 

Fingers a-flicking, 

They dancing went. . . . 

Are you not already out of breath in the hilarious 
escapade? 

The sensible man's quarrel with the proponents 
of free verse is not that they write such good prose; 
not that they espouse the natural rhythms of the 
rain, the brook, the wind-grieved tree; this is all to 
the best, even if as old as Solomon. It is that 
they affect to disdain the superlative harmonies of 
artificed and ordered rhythms; that knowing not 
a spondee from a tribrach they vapour about pro- 
sody, of which they know nothing, and imagine to 
be new what antedates the Upanishads. The 
haunting beauty of Mr. de la Mare's delicate art 
springs from an ear of superlative tenderness and 
sophistication. The daintiest alternation of iam- 
bus and trochee is joined to the serpent's cunning 
in swiftly tripping dactyls. Probably this arti- 
fice is greatly unconscious, the meed of the trained 
musician; but let no singer think to upraise his 
voice before the Lord ere he master the axioms 
of prosody. Imagist journals please copy. 



276 SHANDYGAFF 

One may well despair of conveying in a few 
rough paragraphs the gist of this quaint, fanciful, 
brooding charm. There is something fey about 
much of the book: it peers behind the curtains of 
twilight and sees strange things. In its love of 
children, its inspired simplicity, its sparkle of whim 
and iEsopian brevity, I know nothing finer. Let 
me just cut for you one more slice of this rarely 
seasoned pastry. 

THE LITTLE BIRD 

My dear Daddie bought a mansion 

For to bring my Mammie to, 
In a hat with a long feather, 

And a trailing gown of blue; 
And a company of fiddlers 

And a rout of maids and men 
Danced the clock round to the morning, 

In a gay house-warming then. 
And when all the guests were gone, and 

All was still as still can be, 
In from the dark ivy hopped a 

Wee small bird: and that was Me. 

"Peacock Pie" is immortal diet indeed, as Sir 
Walter said of his scrip of joy. Annealed as we 
are, I think it will discompose the most callous. 
It is a sweet feverfew for the heats of the spirit. 
It is full of outlets of sky. 

As for Mr. de la Mare himself, he is a modest 



SBANDYGAFF 277 

man and keeps behind his songs. Recently he 
paid his first visit to America, and we may hope 
that even on Fifth Avenue he saw some fairies. 
He lectured at some of our universities and en- 
dured the grotesque plaudits of dowagers and pro- 
fessors who doubtless pretended to have read his 
work. Although he is forty-four, and has been 
publishing for nearly sixteen years, he has evaded 
"Who's Who." He lives in London, is married, 
and has four children. For a number of years 
he worked for the Anglo-American Oil Company. 
Truly the Muse sometimes lends to her favourites 
a merciful hardiness. 



THE LITERARY PAWNSHOP 

EXCELLENT Parson Adams, in "Joseph 
Andrews," is not the only literary man 
who has lamented the difficulty of ran- 
soming a manuscript for immediate cash. It will 
be remembered that Mr. Adams had in his sad- 
dlebag nine volumes of sermons in manuscript, 
"as well worth a hundred pounds as a shilling was 
worth twelve pence." Offering one of these as 
a pledge, Parson Adams besought Mr. Tow- 
Wouse, the innkeeper, to lend him three guineas, 
but the latter had so little stomach for a trans- 
action of this sort that "he cried out, ' Coming, sir,* 
though nobody called; and ran downstairs without 
any fear of breaking his neck." 

As a whimsical essayist (with whom I have 
talked over these matters) puts it, the business of 
literature is imperfectly coordinated with life. 

Almost any other kind of property is hockable 
for ready cash. A watch, a ring, an outworn suit 
of clothes, a chair, a set of books, all these will 
find willing purchasers. But a manuscript which 
happens not to meet the fancy of the editors must 
perforce lie idle in your drawer though it sparkle 

278 



SHANDYGAFF 279 

with the brilliants of wit, and five or ten years hence 
collectors may list it in their catalogues. No 
mount of piety along Sixth Avenue will accept it 
in pawn, no Hartford Lunch will exchange it for 
corned beef hash and dropped egg. This is a dis- 
mal thing. 

This means that there is an amusing and a 
competent living to be gained by a literary agent 
of a new kind. Think how many of the "most 
famous writers have trod the streets ragged and 
hungry in their early days. There were times 
when they would have sold their epics, their 
novels, their essays, for the price of a square meal. 
Think of the booty that would accumulate in the 
shop of a literary pawnbroker. The early work 
of famous men would fill his safe to bursting. 
Later on he might sell it for a thousand times 
what he gave. There is nothing that grows to 
such fictitious value as manuscript. 

Think of Francis Thompson, when he was a 
bootmaker's assistant in Leicester Square. He 
was even too poor to buy writing materials. His 
early poems were scribbled on scraps of old ac- 
count books and wrapping paper. How readily 
he would have sold them for a few shillings. Or 
Edgar Poe in the despairing days of his wife's 
illness. Or R. L. S. in the fits of depression 
caused by his helpless dependence upon his father 



280 SHANDYGAFF 

for funds. What a splendid opportunity these 
crises in writers' lives would offer to the enter- 
prising buyer of manuscripts! 

Be it understood, of course, that the pawn- 
broker must be himself an appreciator of good 
things. No reason why he should buy poor stuff, 
even though the author of it be starving. 
Richard Le Gallienne has spoken somewhere of 
the bookstores which sell "books that should never 
have been written to the customers who should 
never have been born." Our pawnbroker must 
guard himself against buying this kind of stuff. 
He will be besieged with it. Very likely Mr. 
Le Gallienne himself will be the first to offer him 
some. But his task will be to discover new and 
true talent beneath its rags, and stake it to a ham 
sandwich when that homely bite will mean more 
than a dinner at the Ritz ten years later. 

The idea of the literary pawnbroker comes to 
me from the (unpublished) letters of John Mistle- 
toe, author of the "Dictionary of Deplorable 
Facts," that wayward and perverse genius who 
wandered the Third Avenue saloons when he might 
have been feted by the Authors' League had he 
lived a few years longer. Some day, I hope, the 
full story of that tragic life may be told, and the 
manuscripts still cherished by his executor made 
public. In the meantime, this letter, which he 



SHANDYGAFF 281 

wrote in 1908, gives a sad and vivid little picture 
of the straits of unadmitted genius: 

"I write from Connor's saloon. Paunchy Con- 
nor has been my best — indeed my only — friend in 
this city, when every editor, publisher, and critic 
has given me the frozen mitt. Of course I know 
why . . . the author of "Vermin" deserves 
not, nor wants, their hypocritical help. The 
book was too true to life to please the bourgeois 
and yet not ribald enough to tickle the prurient. 
I had a vile pornographic publisher after me the 
other day; he said if I would rub up some of the 
earlier chapters and inject a little more spice he 
thought he could do something with it — as a 
paper-covered erotic for shop-girls, I suppose he 
meant. I kicked him downstairs. The stinking 
bounder! 

"Until to-day I had been without grub for sixty 
hours. That is literally true. I was ashamed of 
sponging on Paunchy, and could not bring myself 
to come back to the saloon where he would will- 
ingly have fed me. I did get a job for two days as 
a deckhand on an Erie ferryboat, but they found 
out I did not belong to the union. I had two 
dollars in my pocket — a fortune — but while I was 
dozing on a doorstep on Hudson Street, waiting 
for the cafes to open (I was too done to walk half a 
dozen blocks to an all-night restaurant), some 



282 SHANDYGAFF 

snapper picked my pocket. That night I slept in 
a big drain pipe where they were putting up a 
building. 

"Why isn't there a pawnshop where one could 
hang up MSS. for cash? In my hallroom over 
Connor's saloon I have got stuff that will be bid 
for at auctions some day (that isn't conceit, I 
know it), but at this moment, July 17, 1908, I 
couldn't raise 50 cents on it. If there were a lit- 
erary mount of piety — a sort of Parnassus of 
piety as it were — the uncle in charge might bless 
the day he met me. Well, it won't be for long. 
This cancer is getting me surely. 

"This morning I'm cheerful. I've scrubbed 
and swept Paunchy's bar for him, and the dirty, 
patchouli-smelling hop-joint he keeps upstairs, 
bless his pimping old heart. And I've had a real 
breakfast: boiled red cabbage, stewed beef (con- 
demned by the inspector), rye bread, raw onions, 
a glass of Tom and Jerry, and two big schooners of 
the amber. I'm working on my Third Avenue 
novel. called 'The L.' 

"I shan't give you my right address, or you'd 
send someone down here to give me money, you 
damned philanthropist. . . . Connor ain't 
the real name, so there. When I die (soon) they'll 
find Third Avenue written on my heart, if I still 
have one. . . ." 



SHANDYGAFF 283 

It is interesting to recall that the MS. of his 
poems "Pavements, and Other Verses" was 
bought by a private collector for $250 last winter. 

Will not some literary agent think over this 
idea? 



A MORNING IN MARATHON 

ONE violet throbbing star was climbing in 
I the southeast at half -past four, and the 
whole flat plain was rich with golden 
moonlight. Early rising in order to quicken the 
furnace and start the matinsong in the steampipes 
becomes its own reward when such an orange moon 
is dropping down the sky. Even Peg (our most 
volatile Irish terrier) was plainly awed by the 
blaze of pale light, and hopped gingerly down the 
rimy back steps. But the cat was imabashed. 
Cats are bora by moonlight and are leagued with 
the powers of darkness and mystery. And so 
Nicholas Vachel Lindsay (he is named for the 
daring poet of Illinois) stepped into the moonshine 
without a qualm. 

There are certain little routine joys known 
only to the servantless suburbanite. Every morn- 
ing the baker leaves a bag of crisp French rolls 
on the front porch. Every morning the milk- 
man deposits his little bottles of milk and cream 
on the back steps. Every morning the furnace 
needs a little grooming, that the cheery thump of 
rising pressure may warm the radiators upstairs. 

284 



SHANDYGAFF 285 

Then the big agate kettle must be set over the 
blue gas flame, for hot water is needed both for 
shaving and cocoa. Our light breakfast takes 
only a moment to prepare. By the time the Nut 
Brown Maid comes singing downstairs, cocoa, 
rolls, and boiled eggs are ready in the sunny little 
dining room, and the Tamperer is bathed and 
shaved and telephoning to Central for "the 
exact time." The 8:13 train waits for no man, 
and it is nearly a mile to the station. 

But the morning I think of was not a routine 
morning. On routine mornings the Tamperer 
rises at ten minutes to seven, the alarm clock 
being set for 6:45: which allows five minutes for 
drowsy head. The day in question was early 
February when snow lay white and powdery on 
the ground, and the 6 o'clock train from Marathon 
had to be caught. There is an express for Phil- 
adelphia that leaves the Pennsylvania Station at 
7:30 and this the Tamperer had to take, to make 
a 10 o'clock appointment in the Quaker City. 
That was why the alarm clock rang at half-past 
four. 

I cannot recall a more virginal morning than 
that snowy twilight before the dawn. No de- 
scription that I have ever read — not even the day- 
break in "Prince Otto," or Pippa's dawn boiling 
in pure gold over the rim of night — would be just 



286 SHANDYGAFF 

to that exquisite growth of colour in the eastern 
sky. The violet star faded to forget-me-not and 
then to silver and at last closed his weary eye; 
the flat Long Island prairie gradually lost its 
fairy-tale air of mystery and dream; the close 
ceiling of the night receded into infinite space 
as the sun waved his radiant arms 'over the 
horizon. 

But this was after I had left the house. The 
sun did not raise his head from the pillow until I 
was in the train. The Nut Brown Maid was still 
nested in her warm white bed as I took her up 
some tea and toast just before departing. 

The walk to the station, over the crisply frozen 
snow, was delicious. Marathon is famous for its 
avenue of great elms, which were casting deep 
blue shadows in the strange light — waning moon 
and waxing day. The air was very chill — only 
just above zero — and the smoking car seemed very 
cold and dismal. I huddled my overcoat about 
me and tried to smoke and read the paper. But 
in that stale, fetid odour of last night's tobacco and 
this morning's wet arctics the smoker was but a 
dismal place. The exaltation of the dawn drop- 
ped suddenly into a kind of shivering nausea. 

I changed to another car and threw away the 
war news. Just then the sun came gloriously over 
the edge of the fields and set the snow afire. As 



SHANDYGAFF 287 

we rounded the long curve beyond Woodside I 
could see the morning light shining upon the 
Metropolitan Tower, and when we glided into the 
basement of the Pennsylvania Station my heart 
was already attuned to the thrill of that glorious 
place. Perhaps it can never have the fascination 
for me that the old dingy London terminals have 
— King's Cross, Paddington, or Saint Pancras, with 
their delicious English bookstalls and those por- 
ters in corduroy — but the Pennsylvania is a 
wonderful place after all, a marble palace of 
romance and a gallant place to roam about. It 
seems like a stable without horses, though, for 
where are the trains? No chance to ramble 
about the platforms (as in London) to» watch the 
Duke of Abercorn or the Lord Claude Hamilton, 
or other of those green or blue English locomo- 
tives with lordly names, being groomed for the 
run. 

In the early morning the Pennsylvania Station 
catches in its high-vaulted roof the first flush of 
sunlight; and before the flood of commuters begins 
to pour in, the famous station cat is generally 
sitting by the baggage room shining his morning 
face. Up at the marble lunch counters the col- 
oured gentlemen are serving hot cakes and coffee 
to stray travellers, and the shops along the Arcade 
are being swept and garnished. As I passed 



288 SHANDYGAFF 

through on my way to the Philadelphia train I 
was amused by a wicker basket full of Scotch 
terrier puppies — five or six of them tumbling 
over one another in their play and yelping so that 
the station rang. "Every little bit yelps" as 
someone has said. I was reminded of the last 
words I ever read in Virgil (the end of the sixth 
book of the Aeneid) — slant litore puppes, which I 
always yearned to translate "a litter of puppies." 
My train purred smoothly under the Hudson 
and under Jersey City as I lit my cigar and 
settled comfortably into the green plush. When 
we emerged from the tunnel on the other side of 
the long ridge (which is a degenerate spur from 
the Palisades farther north) a crescent of sun 
was just fringing the crest with fire. Another 
moment and we flashed onto the Hackensack 
marshes and into the fully minted gold of superb 
morning. The day was begun. 



THE AMERICAN HOUSE OF LORDS 

I AM not a travelling salesman (except in so 
far as all men are) so I do not often travel 
in the Club Car. But when I do, irresistibly 
the thought comes that I have strayed into the 
American House of Lords. Unworthily I sit 
among our sovereign legislators, a trifle ill at ease 
mayhap. In the day coach I am at home with my 
peers — those who smoke cheap tobacco; who 
nurse fretful babies; who strew the hot plush with 
sandwich crumbs and lean throbbing foreheads 
against the window pane. 

But the Club Car which swings so smoothly at 
the end of a limited train is a different place, 
pardee. It is not a hereditary chamber, but it is 
none the less the camera stellata of our prosperous 
carnivora. Patently these men are Lords. In 
two facing rows, averted from the landscape, 
condemned to an uneasy scrutiny of their mutual 
prosperity, they sit in leather chairs. They curve 
roundly from neck to groin. They are shaven to 
the raw, soberly clad, derby hatted, glossily 
booted. Always they smoke cigars, those strange, 
blunt cigars that are fatter at one end than 



290 SHANDYGAFF 

at the other. Some (these I think are the very- 
prosperous) wear shoes with fawn-coloured 
tops. 

Is it strange then that I, an ill-clad and pipe- 
smoking traveller, am faintly uneasy in this House 
of Lords? I forget myself while reading poetry 
and drop my tobacco cinders on the rug, missing 
the little silver gourd that rests by my left foot. 
Straight the white- jacketed mulatto sucks them 
up with a vacuum cleaner and a deprecating air. 
I pass to the brass veranda at the end of the car 
for a bracing change of atmosphere. And return- 
ing, the attendant has removed my little pile of 
books which I left under my chair, and hidden 
them in his serving grotto. It costs me at least a 
whiskey and soda to get them out. 

It means, I suppose, that I am not marked for 
success. I am cigarless and derbyless; I do not 
wear those funny little white margins inside my 
vest. My scarf is still the dear old shabby one in 
which I was married (I bought it at Rogers 
Peet's, and I shall never forget it) and when I 
look up from Emily Dickinson's poems with a 
trembling thrill of painful ecstasy, I am frightened 
by the long row of hard faces and cynic eyes 
opposite me. 

The House of Lords disquiets me. Even if I 
ring a bell and order a bottle I am not happy. Is 



SHANDYGAFF 291 

it only the swing of the car that nauseates me? 
At any rate, I want to get home — home to that 
star-sown meadow and the two brown arms at the 
journey's end. 
December, 191b 



COTSWOLD WINDS 

SPRING comes late on these windy up- 
lands, and indoors one still sits close to the 
fire. These are the days of booming gales 
over the sheepwolds, and the afternoon ride with 
Shotover becomes an adventure. I am not one 
of those who shirk bicycling in a wind. Give 
me a two-mile spin with the gust astern, just to 
loosen the muscles and sweep the morning's books 
and tobacco from the brain — and then turn and 
at it! It is like swimming against a great crystal 
river. Cap off, head up — no crouching over the 
handle-bars like the Saturday afternoon shopmen! 
Wind in your hair, the broad blue Cotswold slopes 
about you, every ounce of leg-drive straining on the 
pedals — three minutes of it intoxicates you. You 
crawl up- wind roaring the most glorious nonsense, 
ribaldry, and exultation into the face of the blast. 
I am all for the Cotswolds in the last vacation 
before "Schools." In mid-March our dear gray 
Mother Oxford sends us away for six weeks while 
she decks herself against the spring. Far and wide 
we scatter. The Prince to Germany — the dons 
to Devon — the reading parties to quiet country 



SHANDYGAFF 293 

inns here and there. Some blithe spirits of my 
acquaintance are in those glorious dingy garrets 
of the Latin Quarter with Murger's "Scenes de la 
Vie de Boheme" as a viaticum. Others are among 
the tulips in Holland. But this time I vote for 
the Cots wolds and solitude. 

There is a straggling gray village which lies in 
the elbow of a green valley, with a clear trout- 
stream bubbling through it. There is a well- 
known inn by the bridge, the resort of many 
anglers. But I am not for inns nor for anglers 
this time. It is a serious business, these last two 
months before Schools, and I and my books are 
camped in a "pensive citadel" up on the hill, 
where the postman's wife cares for me and wor- 
ries because I do not eat more than two normal 
men. There is a low-ceilinged sitting room with 
a blazing fire. From one corner a winding stair 
climbs to the bedroom above. There are pipes 
and tobacco, pens and a pot of ink. There are 
books — all historical volumes, the only evidence 
of relaxation being Arthur Gibbs' "A Cotswold 
Village" and one of Bartholomew's survey maps. 
Ten hours' work, seven hours' sleep, three hours' 
bicycling — that leaves four hours for eating and 
other emergencies. That is how we live on twenty- 
four hours a day, and turn a probable Fourth in 
the Schools into a possible Third. 



294 SHANDYGAFF 

And what could better those lonely afternoon 
rides on Shotover? The valley of the Colne is 
one of the most entrancing bits in England, I 
think. A lonely road, winding up the green 
trough of the stream, now and then crossing the 
shoulder of the hills, takes you far away from 
most of the things one likes to leave behind. 
There are lambs, little black fuzzy fellows, on the 
uplands; there are scores of rabbits disappearing 
with a flirt of white hindquarters into their way- 
side burrows; in Chedworth Woods there are 
pheasants, gold and blue and scarlet, almost 
as tame as barnyard fowls; everywhere there are 
skylarks throbbing in the upper blue — and these 
are all your company. Now and then a great 
yellow farm-wagon and a few farmers in cordu- 
roys — but no one else. That is the kind of 
country to bicycle into. Up and up the valley, 
past the Roman villa, until you come to the 
smoking-place. No pipeful ever tasted better 
than this, stretched on the warm grass watching 
the green water dimpling over the stones. That 
same water passes the Houses of Parliament by 
and by. I think it would stay by Chedworth 
Woods if it could — and so would I. 

But it is four o'clock, and tea will be waiting. 
Protesting Shotover is pushed up a swampy hill- 
side through the trees — and we come out onto a 



SHANDYGAFF 295 

hilltop some 800 feet above the sea. And from 
there it is eight miles homeward, mostly down- 
hill, with a broad blue horizon to meet the eye. 
Back to the tiny cottage looking out onto the 
village green and the old village well; back to 
four cups of tea and hot buttered toast; and then 
for Metternich and the Vienna Congress. Sol- 
vitur bicyclando I 

And when we clatter down the High again, 
two weeks hence, Oxford will have made her 
great transformation. We left her in winter, 
mud and sleet and stormy sunsets. But a fort- 
night from now, however cold, it will be what we 
hopefully call the Summer Term. There will be 
white flannels, and Freshmen learning to pimt 
on the Cher. But that is not for us now. There 
are the Schools. . . . 

Bibury, April, 1913. 



CLOUDS 

WHO has ever done justice to the majesty 
of the clouds? Alice Meynell, perhaps? 
George Meredith? Shelley, who was 
"gold-dusty with tumbling amongst the ^stars?" 
Henry Van Dyke has sung of "The heavenly 
hills of Holland," but in a somewhat treble pipe; 
R. L. S. said it better — "The travelling moun- 
tains of the sky." Ah, how much is still to be said 
of those piled-up mysteries of heaven! 

We rode to-day down the Delaware Valley 
from Milford to Stroudsburg. That wonderful 
meadowland between the hills (it is just as lovely 
as the English Avon, but how much more likely 
we are to praise the latter!) converges in a huge V 
toward the Water Gap, drawing the foam of 
many a mountain creek down through that match- 
less pass way. Over the hills which tumble steeply 
on either side soared the vast Andes of the clouds, 
hanging palpable in the sapphire of a summer 
sky. What height on height of craggy softness 
on those silver steeps! What rounded bosomy 
curves of golden vapour; what sharpened pinnacles 
of nothingness, spiring in ever-changing contour 

296 



SHANDYGAFF 297 

into the intangible blue! Man the finite, reveller 
in the explainable and the exact, how can his eye 
pierce or his speech describe the rolling robes of 
glory in which floating moisture clothes itself! 

Mile on mile, those peaks of midsummer 
snow were marching the highways of the air. 
Fascinated, almost stupefied, we watched their 
miracles of form and unfathomable glory. It was 
as though the stockades of earth had fallen away. 
Palisaded, cliff on radiant cliff, the spires of the 
Unseeable lay bare. Ever since childhood one 
has dreamed of scaling the bulwarks of the clouds, 
of riding the ether on those strange galleons. 
Unconscious of their own beauty, they pass in 
dissolving shapes — now scudding on that waveless 
azure sea; now drifting with scant steerage way. 
If one could lie upon their opal summits what 
depths and what abysses would meet the eye! 
What glowing chasms to catch the ardour of the 
sun, what chill and empty hollows of creaming 
mist, dropping in pale and awful spirals. Float- 
ing flat like ice floes beneath the greenish moon, 
or beetling up in prodigious ledges of seeming 
solidness on a sunny morning — are they not the 
most superbly heart-easing miracles of our visible 
world? Watch them as they shimmer down 
toward the Water Gap in every shade of silver and 
rose and opal; or delicately tinged with amber 



298 SHANDYGAFF 

when they have caught some jewelled chain of 
lightning and are suffused with its lurid sparkle. 
Man has worshipped sticks and stones and stars: 
has he never bent a knee to the high gods of the 
clouds? 

There they wander, the unfettered spirits of 
bliss or doom. Holding within their billowed 
masses the healing punishments of the rain,chaliced 
beakers of golden flame, lightnings instant and 
unbearable as the face of God — dissolving into a 
crystal nothing, reborn from the viewless caverns 
of air — here let us erect one enraptured altar to 
the bright mountains of the sky! 

At sunset we were climbing back among the 
wooded hills of Pike County, fifteen hundred feet 
above the salt. One great castle of clouds that 
had long drawn our eyes was crowning some in- 
visible airy summit far above us. As the sun 
dipped it grew gray, soft, and pallid. And then one 
last banner of rosy light beaconed over its highest 
turret — a final flare of glory to signal curfew to all 
the other silver hills. Slowly it faded in the shad- 
ow of dusk. 

We thought that was the end. But no — a 
little later, after we had reached the farm, 
we saw that the elfs of cloudland were still at play. 
Every few minutes the castle glowed with a sud- 
den gush of pale blue lightning. And while we 



SHANDYGAFF 299 

watched, with hearts almost painfully sated by 
beauty, through some leak the precious fire ran 
out; a great stalk of pure and unspeakable bright- 
ness fled passionately to earth. This happened 
again and again until the artery of fire was dis- 
charged. And then, slowly, slowly, the stars 
began to pipe up the evening breeze. Our cloud 
drifted gently away. 

Where and in what strange new form did it 
greet the flush of dawn? Who knows? 



UNHEALTHY 

ON SATURDAY afternoons Titania and I 
always have an adventure. On Sundays 
we stay at home and dutifully read manu- 
scripts (I am the obscure creature known as a 
"publisher's reader") but Saturday post meri- 
diem is a golden tract of time wherein we wander 
as we list. 

The 35th Street entrance to McQueery's has 
long been hallowed as our stell-dich-ein. We meet 
there at one o'clock. That is to say, I arrive at 
12:59 and spend fifteen minutes in most animated 
reflection. There is plenty to think about. One 
may stand between the outer and inner lines of 
glass doors and watch the queer little creatures 
that come tumbling out of the cloak and suit 
factory across the street. Or one may stand in- 
side the store, on a kind of terrace, beneath pine- 
apple shaped arc lights, looking down upon the 
bustle of women on the main floor. Best of all, 
one may stroll along the ornate gallery to one 
side where all sorts and conditions of ladies wait 
for other ladies who have promised to meet them 



SHANDYGAFF 301 

at one o'clock. They divide their time between 
examining the mahogany victrolae and deciding 
what kind of sundae they will have for lunch. A 
very genteel old gentleman with white hair and a 
long morning coat and an air of perpetual irrita- 
tion is in charge of this social gallery. He wears 
the queer, soft, flat-soled boots that are suggestive 
of corns. There is an information bureau there, 
where one may learn everything except the time 
one may expect one's wife to arrive. But I have 
learned a valuable subterfuge. If I am waiting 
for Titania, and beginning to despair of her 
arrival, I have only to go to a telephone to call 
her up. As soon as I have put the nickel in, she 
is sure to appear. Nowadays I save the nickel 
by going into a booth and pretending to telephone . 
Sure enough, at 1:14, Ingersoll time, in she 
trots. 

We have a jargon of our own. 

"Eye-polishers?" say I. 

"Yes," says Titania, "but there was a block 
at 42nd Street. I'm so sorry, Grump." 

"Eye-polishers" is our term for the Fifth 
Avenue busses, because riding on them makes 
Titania's eyes so bright. More widely, the word 
connotes anything that produces that desirable 
result, such as bunches of violets, lavender ped- 
dlers, tea at Mary Elizabeth's, spring millinery, 



302 SHANDYGAFF 

or finding sixpence in her shoe. This last is a rite 
suggested by the old song: 

And though maids sweep their hearths no less 

Than they were wont to do, 
Yet who doth now for cleanliness 

Find sixpence in her shoe? 

A bright dime does very well as a sixpenny 
piece. 

We always lunch at Moretti's on Saturday: it is 
the recognized beginning of an adventure. The 
Moretti lunch has advanced from a quarter to 
thirty cents, I am sorry to say, but this is readily 
compensated by the Grump buying Sweet Capo- 
rals instead of something Turkish. A packet of 
cigarettes is another curtain-raiser for an adven- 
ture. On other days publishers' readers smoke 
pipes, but on Saturdays cigarettes are possible. 

"Antipasto?" 

"No, thanks." 

"Minestrone or consomme?" 

"Two minestrone, two prime ribs, ice cream and 
coffee. Red wine, please." That is the formula. 
We have eaten the "old reliable Moretti lunch" 
so often that the routine has become a ritual. Oh, 
excellent savor of the Moretti basement! Com- 
pounded of warmth, a pungent pourri of smells, 
and the jangle of thick china, how diverting it is! 



SHANDYGAFF 303 

The franc-tireur in charge of the wine-bin watches 
us complaisantly from his counter where he sits 
flanked by flasks of Hoboken chianti and a case of 
brittle cigars. 

How good Moretti's minestrone tastes to the 
unsophisticated tongue. What though it be only 
an azoic extract of intense potato, dimly tinct 
with sargasso and macaroni — it has a pleasing 
warmth and bulk. Is it not the prelude to an 
Adventure? 

Well, where shall we go to-day? No two 
explorers dickering over azimuth and dead reckon- 
ing could discuss latitude and longitude more 
earnestly than Titania and I argue our possible 
courses. Generally, however, she leaves it to me 
to chart the journey. That gives me the pride 
of conductor and her the pleasure of being sur- 
prised. 

According to our Mercator's projection (which, 
duly wrapped in a waterproof envelope, we 
always carry on our adventures) there was a little 
known region lying nor' nor'west of Blackwell's 
Island and plotted on the map as East River 
Park. I had heard of this as a picturesque and 
old-fashioned territory, comparatively free from 
footpads and lying near such places as Astoria 
and Hell Gate. We laid a romantic course due 
east along 35th Street, Titania humming a little 



304 SHANDYGAFF 

snatch from an English music-hall song that once 
amused us: 



"My old man's a fireman 
Now what do you think of that? 
He wears goblimey breeches 
And a little goblimey hat." 

She always quotes this to me when (she says) I 
wear my hat too far on the back of my head. 

The cross slope of Murray Hill drops steeply 
downward after one leaves Madison Avenue. We 
dipped into a region that has always been very 
fascinating to me. Under the roaring L, past 
dingy saloons, animal shops, tinsmiths, and pain- 
less dentists, past the old dismantled Manhattan 
hospital. The taste of spring was in the air: 
one of the dentists was having his sign regilded, 
a: huge four-pronged grinder as big as McTeague's 
in Frank Norris's story. Oysters going out, the 
new brew of Bock beer coming in: so do the saloons 
mark the vernal equinox. 

A huge green chalet built on stilts, with two tiers 
of trains rumbling by, is the L station at 34th 
Street and Second Avenue. A cutting wind blew 
from the East River, only two blocks away. I 
paid two nickels and we got into the front car of 
the northbound train. 

Until Titania and I attain the final glory of 



SHANDYGAFF 305 

riding in an aeroplane, or ascend Jacob's ladder, 
there never will be anything so thrilling as soaring 
over the housetops in the Second Avenue L. 
Rocking, racketing, roaring over those crazy 
trestles, now a glimpse of the leaden river to the 
east, now a peep of church spires and skyscrapers 
on the west, and the dingy imitation lace curtains 
of the third-story windows flashing by like a 
recurring pattern — it is a voyage of romance! 
Did you ever stand at the front door of an Ele- 
vated train, watching the track stretch far ahead 
toward the Bronx, and the little green stations 
slipping nearer and nearer? The Subway is a 
black, bellowing horror; the bus a swaying, jolty 
start-and-stop, bruising your knees against the 
seat in front; but the L swings you up and over the 
housetops, smooth and sheer and swift. 

We descended at 86th Street and found our- 
selves in a new world. A broad, dingy street, 
lined by shabby brown houses and pushbutton 
apartments, led in a gentle descent toward the 
river. The neighbourhood was noisy, quarrel- 
some, and dirty. After a long, bitter March the 
thaw had come at last: the street was viscous 
with slime, the melting snow lay in grayish piles 
along the curbs. Small boys on each side of the 
street were pelting sodden snowballs which spat- 
tered around us as we walked down the pavement. 



306 SHANDYGAFF 

But after two blocks things changed suddenly. 
The trolley swung round at a right angle (up 
Avenue A) and the last block of 86th Street 
showed the benefit of this manoeuvre. The 
houses grew neat and respectable. A little side 
street branching off to the left (not recorded by 
Mercator) revealed some quaint cottages with 
gables and shuttered windows so mid- Victorian 
that my literary heart leaped and I dreamed at 
once of locating a novel in this fascinating spot. 
And then we rounded the corner and saw the little 
park. 

It was a bit of old Chelsea, nothing less. Ti- 
tania clapped her hands, and I lit my pipe in 
gratification. Beside us was a row of little houses 
of warm red brick with peaked mansard roofs and 
cozy bay windows and polished door knockers. 
In front of them was the lumpy little park, cut 
up into irregular hills, where children were flying 
kites. And beyond that, an embankment and 
the river in a dimjwet mist. There was Blackwell's 
Island, and a sailing barge slipping by. In the 
distance we could see the colossal span of the new 
Hell Gate bridge. With the journalist's instinct 
for superlatives I told Titania it was the largest 
single span in the world. I wonder if it is? 

As to that I know not. But it was the river 
that lured us. On the embankment we found 






SHANDYGAFF 307 

benches and sat down to admire the scene. It 
was as picturesque as Battersea in Whistler's 
mistiest days. A ferryboat, crossing to Astoria, 
hooted musically through the haze. Tugs, puff- 
ing up past BlackwelPs Island into the Harlem 
River, replied with mellow blasts. The pungent 
tang of the East River tickled our nostrils, and all 
my old ambition to be a tugboat captain returned. 

And then trouble began. Just as I was planning 
how we might bilk our landlord on Long Island 
and move all our belongings to this delicious 
spot, gradually draw our friends around us, and 
make East End Avenue the Cheyne Walk of New 
York — we might even import an English imagist 
poet to lend cachet to the coterie — I saw by 
Titania's face that something was wrong. 

I pressed her for the reason of her frown. 

She thought the region was unhealthy. 

Now when Titania thinks that a place is un- 
healthy no further argument is possible. Just 
on what data she bases these deductions I have 
never been able to learn. I think she can tell by 
the shape of the houses, or the lush quality of the 
foliage, or the fact that the garbage men collect 
from the front instead of from the back. But 
however she arrives at the conclusion, it is im- 
mutable. 

Any place that I think is peculiarly amusing, or 



308 SHANDYGAFF 

quaint, or picturesque, Titania thinks is un- 
healthy. 

Sometimes I can see it coming. We are on our 
way to Mulberry Bend, or the Bowery, or Far- 
rish's Chop House. I see her brow begin to 
pucker. "Do you feel as though it is going to 
be unhealthy?" I ask anxiously. If she does, 
there is nothing for it but to clutch at the nearest 
subway station and hurry up to Grant's Tomb. 
In that bracing ether her spirits revive. 

So it was on this afternoon. My Utopian vis- 
ion of a Chelsea in New York, outdoing the grimy 
salons of Greenwich Village, fell in splinters at the 
bottom of my mind. Sadly I looked upon the old 
Carl Schurz mansion on the hill, and we departed 
for the airy plateaus of Central Park. Desper- 
ately I pointed to the fading charms of East 
River Park — the convent round the corner, the 
hokey pokey cart by the curbstone. 

I shall never be a tugboat captain. It isn't 
healthy. 



CONFESSIONS OF A SMOKER 

TRUE smokers are born and not made. I 
remember my grandfather with his snowy 
beard gloriously stained by nicotine; from 
my first years I never saw my father out of reach 
of his pipe, save when asleep. Of what avail 
for my mother to promise unheard bonuses if I did 
not smoke until I was twenty? By the time I 
was eight years old I had constructed a pipe of an 
acorn and a straw, and had experimented with 
excelsior as fuel. From that time I passed 
through the well-known stages of dried bean-pod 
cigars, hayseed, corn silk, tea leaves, and (first 
ascent of the true Olympus) Recruits Little 
Cigars smoked in a lumberyard during school 
recess. Thence it was but a step to the first bag 
of Bull Durham and a twenty-five-cent pipe with 
a curved bone stem. 

I never knew the traditional pangs of Huck 
Finn and the other heroes of fiction. I never yet 
found a tobacco that cost me a moment's unease 
— but stay, there was a cunning mixture devised 
by some comrades at college that harboured in 
its fragrant shreds neatly chopped sections of 



S10 SHANDYGAFF 

rubber bands. That was sheer poison, I grant 
you. 

The weed needs no new acolyte to hymn her 
sanctities. Where Raleigh, Pepys, Tennyson, 
Kingsley, Calverley, Barrie, and the whimful 
Elia best of all — where these have spoken so 
greatly, the feeble voice may well shrink. But 
that is the joy of true worship: ranks and hier- 
archies are lost, all are brothers in the mystery, 
and amid approving puffs of rich Virginia the 
older saints of the mellow leaf genially greet the 
new freshman, be he never so humble. 

What would one not have given to smoke a 
pipe out with the great ones of the empire! That 
wainscoted back parlour at the Salutation and Cat, 
for instance, where Lamb and Coleridge used to 
talk into the small hours "quaffing egg flip, 
devouring Welsh rabbits, and smoking pipes of 
Orinooko." Or the back garden in Chelsea where 
Carlyle and Emerson counted the afternoon well 
spent, though neither one had said a hundred 
words — had they not smoked together? Or Pis- 
cator and Viator, as they trudged together to 
"prevent the sunrise" on Am well Hill — did not 
the reek of their tobacco trail most bluely on the 
sweet morning air? Or old Fitz, walking on the 
Deben wall at Woodbridge, on his way to go sailing 
with Posh down to Bawdsey Ferry — what mixture 



SHANDYGAFF 311 

did he fill and light? Something recommended by 
Will Thackeray, I'll be sworn. Or, to come down 
to more recent days, think of Captain Joseph 
Conrad at his lodgings in Bessborough Gardens, 
lighting that apocalyptic pipe that preceded the 
first manuscript page of "Almayer's Folly." 
Could I only have been the privileged landlady's 
daughter who cleared away the Captain's break- 
fast dishes that morning ! I wonder if she remem- 
bers the incident?* 

It is the heart of fellowship, the core and pith 
and symbol of masculine friendship and good talk. 
Your cigar will do for drummers, your cigarettes 
for the dilettante smoker, but for the ripened, 
boneset votary nothing but a briar will suffice. 
Away with meerschaum, calabash, cob, and clay: 
they have their purpose in the inscrutable order 
of things, like crossing sweepers and presidents of 
women's clubs; but when Damon and Pythias 
meet to talk things over, well-caked briars are in 
order. Cigars are all right in fiction: for Prince 
Florizel and Colonel Geraldine when they visit the 
famous Divan in Rupert Street. It was Leigh 
Hunt, in the immortal Wishing Cap Papers (so 
little read, alas!), who uttered the finest plea for 
cigars that this language affords, but I will wager 



The reference here is to Chapter IV of Joseph Conrad's "A Personal Record." The 
author's allusions are often sadly obscure. — Editor. 



312 SHANDYGAFF 

not a director of the United Cigar Stores ever 
read it. 

The fine art of smoking used, in older days, to 
have an etiquette, a usage, and traditions of its 
own, which a more hurried and hygienic age has 
discarded. It was the height of courtesy to ask 
your friend to let you taste his pipe, and draw 
therefrom three or four mouthfuls of smoke. 
This afforded opportunity for a gracious exchange 
of compliments. "Will it please you to impart 
your whiff?" was the accepted phrase. And then, 
having savored his mixture, you would have said : 
"In truth, a very excellent leaf," offering your 
own with proper deprecations. This, and many 
other excellent things, we learn from Mr. Apper- 
son's noble book "The Social History of Smok- 
ing," which should be prayer book and breviary 
to every smoker con amore. 

But the pipe rises perhaps to its highest function 
as the solace and companion of lonely vigils. We 
all look back with tender affection on the joys of 
tobacco shared with a boon comrade on some walk- 
ing trip, some high-hearted adventure, over the 
malt-stained counters of some remote alehouse. 
These are the memories that are bittersweet 
beyond the compass of halting words. Never 
again perhaps will we throw care over the hedge 
and stride with Mifflin down the Banbury Road, 



SHANDYGAFF 313 

filling the air with laughter and the fumes of 
Murray's Mellow. But even deeper is the tribute 
we pay to the sour old elbow of briar, the dented, 
blackened cutty that has been with us through a 
thousand soundless midnights and a hundred 
weary dawns when cocks were crowing in the bleak 
air and the pen faltered in the hand. Then is 
the pipe an angel and minister of grace. Clocks 
run down and pens grow rusty, but if your pouch 
be full your pipe will never fail you. 

How great is the witching power of this sover- 
eign rite! I cannot even read in a book of some- 
one enjoying a pipe without my fingers itching to 
light up and puff with him. My mouth has been 
sore and baked a hundred times after an evening 
with Elia. The rogue simply can't help talking 
about tobacco, and I strike a match for every 
essay. God bless him and his dear "Orinooko!" 
Or Parson Adams in "Joseph Andrews" — he 
lights a pipe on every page! 

I cannot light up in a wind. It is too precious 
a rite to be consummated in a draught. I hide 
behind a tree, a wall, a hedge, or bury my head in 
my coat. People see me in the street, vainly seek- 
ing shelter. It is a weakness, though not a shame- 
ful one. But set me in a tavern corner, and fill the 
pouch with " Quiet Moments " (do you know that 
English mixture?) and I am yours to the last ash. 



314 SHANDYGAFF 

I wonder after all what was the sweetest pipe I 
ever smoked? I have a tender spot in memory 
for a fill of Murray's Mellow that Mifflin and I had 
in the old smoking room of the Three Crowns Inn 
at Lichfield. We weren't really thirsty, but we 
drank cider there in honour of Dr. Johnson, sitting 
in his chair and beneath his bust. Then there 
were those pipes we used to smoke at twilight 
sitting on the steps of 17 Heriot Row, the old 
home of R. L. S. in Edinburgh, as we waited for 
Leerie to come by and light the lamps. Oh, pipes 
of youth, that can never come again! 

When George Fox was a young man, sorely 
troubled by visions of the devil, a preacher told 
him to smoke tobacco and sing hymns. 

Not such bad advice. 



HAY FEBRIFUGE 

OUR village is remarkable. 
It contains the greatest publisher in 
the world, the most notable department 
store baron (and inventor of that new form of liter- 
ary essay, the department store ad.), the most frag- 
rant gas tanks in the Department of the East, 
the greatest number of cinders per eye of any 

arondissement served by the R railway, and 

the most bitterly afflicted hay fever sufferer on this 
sneezing sphere. Also the editor of the most 
widely circulated magazine in the world, and the 
author of one of the best selling books that ever 
was written. 

Not bad for one village. 

Your first thought is Northampton, Mass., 
but you are wrong. That is where Gerald Stanley 
Lee lives. For a stamped, addressed envelope I 
will give you the name of our village, and instruc- 
tions for avoiding it. It is bounded on the north 
by goldenrod, on the south by ragweed, on the 
east by asthma and the pollen of anemophylous 
plants. 

It is bounded on the west by a gray stone 

315 



S16 SHANDYGAFF 

facsimile of Windsor Castle, confirmed with but- 
lers, buttresses, bastions, ramparts, repartees, feu- 
dal tenures, moats, drawbridges, posterns, pasterns, 
chevaux de f rise, machicolated battlements, don- 
jons, loopholes, machine-gun emplacements, cal- 
trops, portcullises, glacis, and all the other travaux 
de f antaisie that make life worth living for retired 
manufacturers. The general effect is emetic in 
the extreme. Hard by the castle is a spurious 
and richly gabled stable in the general style of the 
chateau de Chantilly. One brief strip of lawn 
constitutes a gulf of five hundred years in archi- 
tecture, and restrains Runnymede from Versailles. 

Our village is famous for beautiful gardens. At 
five o'clock merchants and gens de lettres return 
home from office and tannery, remove the cinders, 
and commune with vervain and bergamot. The 
countryside is as lovely as Devonshire, equipped 
with sky, trees, rolling terrain, stewed terrapin, 
golf meads, nut sundaes, beagles, spare tires, and 
other props. But we are equally infamous for 
hideous houses, of the Chester A. Arthur era. 
Every prospect pleases, and man alone is vile. 

There is a large, expensive school for flappers. 
on a hill; and a drugstore or pharmacy where 
the flappers come to blow off steam. It would 
be worth ten thousand dollars to Beatrice Herford 
to ambush herself behind the Welch's grape juice 



SHANDYGAFF 317 

life-size cut-out, and takes notes on flapperiana. 
Pond Lyceum Bureau please copy. 

Our village was once famous also as the dwell- 
ing place of an eminent parson, who obtained a 
million signatures for a petition to N. Romanoff, 
asking the abolition of knouting of women in 
Siberia. And now N. Romanoff himself is gone 
to Siberia, and there is no knouting or giving in 
knoutage; no pogroms or ukases or any other 
check on the ladies. Knitting instead of knout- 
ing is the order of the day. 

Knoutings for flappers, say I, after returning 
from the pharmacy or drugstore. 

Dr. Anna Howard Shaw does not live here, 
but she is within a day's journey on the Cinder 
and Bloodshot. 

But I was speaking of hay fever. "Although 
not dangerous to life," say Drs. S. Oppenhehner 
and Mark Gottlieb, "it causes at certain times 
such extreme discomfort to some of its victims as 
to unfit them for their ordinary pursuits. If we 
accept the view that it is a disease of the classes 
rather than the masses we may take the viewpoint 
of self-congratulation rather than of humiliation 
as indicating a superiority in culture and civiliza- 
tion of the favoured few. When the intimate 
connection of pollinosis and culture has been 
firmly grasped by the public mind, the complaint 



318 SHANDYGAFF 

will perhaps come to be looked upon like gout, as 
a sign of breeding. It will be assumed by those 
who have it not. ... As civilization and cul- 
ture advance, other diseases analogous to the 
one under consideration may be developed from 
oversensitiveness to sound, colour, or form, and 
the man of the twenty-first or twenty-second 
century may be a being of pure intellect whose 
organization of mere nervous pulp would be 
shattered by a strong emotion, like a pumpkin 
filled with dynamite." (vide "Pollen Therapy in 
Pollinosis," reprinted from the Medical Record, 
March 18, 1916; and many thanks to Mr. H. L. 
Mencken, fellow sufferer, for sending me a copy 
of this noble pamphlet. I hope to live to grasp 
Drs. Oppenheimer and Gottlieb by the hand. 
Their essay is marked by a wit and learning that 
proves them f ellow-orgiasts in this hypercultivated 
affliction of the cognoscenti.) 

I myself have sometimes attempted to intimate 
some of the affinities between hay fever and 
genius by attributing it (in the debased form of 
literary parody) to those of great intellectual 
stature. Upon the literary vehicles of expression 
habitually employed by Rudyard Kipling, Amy 
Lowell, Edgar Lee Masters, and Hilaire Belloc I 
have wafted a pinch of ragweed and goldenrod; 
with surprising results. These intellectuals were 



SHANDYGAFF 319 

not more immune than myself. For instance, this 
is the spasm ejaculated by Mr. Edgar Lee Mas- 
ters, of Spoon River: 

Ed Grimes always did hate me 

Because I wrote better poetry than he did. 

In the hay fever season I used to walk 

Along the river bank, to keep as far as possible 

Away from pollen. 

One day Ed and his brother crept up behind me 

While I was writing a sonnet, 

Tied my hands and feet, 

And carried me into a hayfield and left me. 

I sneezed myself to death. 

At the funeral the church was full of goldenrod, 

And I think it must have been Ed 

Who sowed that ragweed all round my grave. 

The Lord loveth a cheerful sneezer, and Mr. 
Masters deserves great credit for lending himself 
to the cult in this way. 

I am a fanatical admirer of Mr. Gerald Stanley 
Lee, and have even thought of spending fifty 
of my own dollars, privily and without collusion 
with his publisher, to advertise that remarkable 
book of his called "WE" which is probably the 
ablest and most original, and certainly the most 
verbose, book that has been written about the 
war. Now Mr. Lee (let me light my pipe and 
get this right) is the most eminent victim of words 



320 SHANDYGAFF 

that ever lived in New England (or indeed any- 
where east of East Aurora). Words crowd upon 
him like flies upon a honey-pot: he is helpless to 
resist them. His brain buzzes with them: they 
leap from his eye, distil from his lean and wav- 
ing hand. Good God, not since Rabelais and 
Lawrence Sterne, miscalled Reverend, has one 
human being been so beclotted, bedazzled, and 
bedrunken with syllables. I adore him for it, 
but equally I tremble. Glowing, radiant, trans- 
cendent vocables swim and dissolve in the porches 
of his brain, teasing him with visions far more 
deeply confused than ever Mr. Wordsworth's 
were. The meanest toothbrush that bristles 
(he has confessed it himself) can fill him with 
thoughts that do often lie too deep for publishers. 
Perhaps the orotund soul-wamblings of Coleridge 
are recarnate in him, Scawfell become Mount 
Tom. Who knows? Once I sat at lunch with 
him, and though I am Trencherman Fortissimus 
(I can give you testimonials) my hamburg steak 
fell from my hand as I listened, clutching perilously 
at the hem of his thought. Nay, Mr. Lee, frown 
not: I say it in sincere devotion. If there is one 
man and one book this country needs, now, it is 
Gerald Stanley Lee and "WE." Set me upon 
a coral atoll with that volume, I will repopulate 
the world with dictionaries, and beget lusty tomes. 



SHANDYGAFF 321 

It is a breeding-ground for a whole new philosophy 
of heaven, hell, and the New Haven Railroad. 

But what I was going to say when I lit my 
pipe was this: had I the stature (not the leanness, 
God forbid: sweet are the uses of obesity) of Mr. 
Lee, I could find in any clodded trifle the outlets 
of sky my yearning mind covets: hay fever would 
lead me by prismatic omissions and plunging 
ellipses of thought to the vaster spirals and eddies 
of all-viewing Mind. So does Mr. Lee proceed, 
weaving a new economics and a new bosom for 
advertisiarchs in the mere act of brushing his 
teeth. But alas, the recurring explosions of the 
loathsome and intellectual disease keep my nose on 
the grindstone — or handkerchief. Do I begin to 
soar on upward pinion, nose tweaks me back to 
sealpackerchief. 

The trouble with Mr. Lee is that he is a kind 
of Emerson; a constitutional ascete or Brahmin, 
battling with the staggering voluptuosities of his 
word-sense; a De Quincey needing no opium to set 
him swooning. In fact, he is a poet, and has no 
control over his thoughts. A poet may begin by 
thinking about a tortoise, or a locomotive, or a 
piece of sirloin, and in one whisk of Time his 
mind has shot up to the conceptions of Eternity, 
Transportation, and Nourishment: his cortex 
coruscates and suppurates with abstract thought; 



322 SHANDYGAFF 

words assail him in hordes, and in a flash he is 
down among them, overborne and fighting for his 
life. Mr. Lee finds that millionaires are bound 
down and tethered and stifled by their limousines 
and coupons and factories and vast estates. 
But Mr. Lee himself, who is a millionaire and 
landed proprietor of ideas, is equally the slave of 
his thronging words. They cluster about him 
like barnacles, nobly and picturesquely impeding 
his progress. He is a Laocoon wrestling with 
serpentine sentences. He ought to be confined to 
an eight-hour paragraph. 

All this is not so by the way as you think. 
For if the poet is one who has lost control of his 
thoughts, the hay fever sufferer has lost control 
of his nose. His mucous membrane acts like 
a packet of Roman candles, and who is he to say 
it nay? And our village is bounded on the north 
by goldenrod, on the south by ragweed, on the 
east by chickweed, and on the west by a sleepless 
night. 

I would fain treat pollinosis in the way Mr. Lee 
might discuss it, but that is impqssible. Those 
prolate, sagging spirals of thought, those grape- 
vine twists of irremediable whim, that mind 
shimmering like a poplar tree in sun and wind — 
jetting and spouting like plumbing after a freeze- 
up — 'tis beyond me. I fancy that if Mr. Lee 



SHANDYGAFF 323 

were in bed, and the sheets were untucked at his 
feet, he could spin himself so iridescent and dove- 
throated and opaline a philosophy of the de- 
sirability of sleeping with cold feet, that either 
(1) he would not need to get out of bed to rearrange 
the bedclothes, or (2) he could persuade someone 
else to do it for him. Think, then, what he could 
do for hay fever! 

And as Dr. Crothers said, when you mix what 
you think with what you think you think, efferves- 
cence of that kind always results. 



APPENDIX 

SUGGESTIONS FOR TEACHERS 

This book will be found exceedingly valuable 
for classroom use by teachers of theology, hy- 
draulics, and applied engineering. It is recom- 
mended that it be introduced to students before 
their minds have become hardened, clotted, and 
skeptical. The author does not hold himself 
responsible for any of the statements in the book, 
and reserves the right to disavow any or all of 
them under intellectual pressure. 

For a rapid quiz, the following suggested topics 
will be found valuable for classroom consideration : 

1. Do you discern any evidences of sincerity and serious 

moral purpose in this book? 

2. Why was fifty dollars a week not enough for Mr. 
Kenneth Stockton to live on? Explain three ways 
in which he augmented his income. 

5. What is a "colyumist"? Give one notorious example. 
4. Comment on Don Marquis's attitude toward 

(a) vers libre poets 

(b) beefsteak and onions 

(c) the cut of his trousers (Explain in detail) 

(d) The Republican Party 



SHANDYGAFF 325 

5. Who is Robert Cortes Holliday, and for what is he 

notable? 

6. Where was Vachel Lindsay fumigated, and why? 

7. Who is "The Head of the Firm"? 

8. How much money did the author spend on cider in 
July, 1911? 

9. Who was Denis Dulcet, and what did he die of? 

10. When did William McFee live in Nutley, and why? 

11. How are the works of Harold Bell Wright most useful 
in Kings, Long Island? 

12. Where is Strychnine, and what makes it so fascinating 

to the tourist? Explain 

(a) The Gin Palace 

(b) Kurdmeister 

(c) unedifying Zollverein 

IS. What time did Mr. Simmons get home? 

14. What is a "rarefied and azure-pedalled precinct?" 
Give three examples. 

15. Who are the Dioscuri of Seamen, and what do they 
do? 

16. How many pipes a day do sensible men smoke? De- 
scribe the ideal conditions for a morning pipe. 

17. When did Mr. Blackwell light the furnace? 

18. Name four American writers who are stout enough to be 

a credit to the profession. 

19. "The fumes of the hearty butcher's evening meal 
ascend the stair in vain." Explain this. Who was 
the butcher ? Why " in vain ' ' ? 

20. In what order of the Animal Kingdom does Mr. Pearsall 

Smith classify himself? 

21. "I hope he fell on the third rail." Explain, and give 
the context. Who was "he," and why did he deserve 
this fate? , 



26 SHANDYGAFF 

22. Who was "Mr. Loomis," and why did he leave his 
clothes lying about the floor? 

23. What are the Poetry Society dinners doing to Vachel 
Lindsay? 

24. Why should the Literary Pawnbroker be on his guard 
against Mr. Richard Le Gallienne? 

25. What is the American House of Lords? Who are "our 
prosperous carnivora"? Why do they wear white 
margins inside their waistcoats? 

26. What is minest rone ? Name three ingredients. 

27. What are "publisher's readers," and why do they 

smoke pipes? 

28. What was the preacher's advice to George Fox? 

29. Give three reasons why Mr. Gerald Stanley Lee will 

not like this book. 

30. Why should one wish to grasp Drs. Oppenheimer and 
Gottlieb by the hand? 

31. In respect of Mr. Gerald Stanley Lee, comment 
briefly on these phrases : 

(a) beclotted, bedazzled, and bedrunken with syllables 

(b) the meanest toothbrush that bristles 

(c) Scawf ell become Mount Tom 

FINIS CORONAT OPUS 



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